DIY Nerds

How to nerd-out your house…

Archive for December, 2009

Illuminated Snowflake Ornament

Dec 11

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LEDOrnamentC

Not only do we teach you how to nerd-out your house, but we also show you how to nerd-out for the holidays.  Here is a pretty ingenious Christmas Tree ornament that you could put together in a matter of minutes.  This is a very cheap, easy, and fun way to add some tech to your Christmas Tree this holiday season.  A since today at sundown marks the beginning of Hannukah for our Jewish friends out there you should check out Evil Mad Scientist Deluxe LED Menorah Kit.  Happy Christmahanakwanzika to all, and to all….um see you tomorrow?

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Donkey Kong Shelves

Dec 9

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3810690630_1046fc8436Casey an engineer in Houston with a love for video games came up with a simple cheap and awesome IKEA hack using off the shelf parts…no pun intended.  Let’s just get this out of the way right now, your shelves suck compared to this awesome feat of nerdiness.

“Here’s a little project I came up with using some Lack shelves to add some flair to my game room. Using some tape, paint, and a lazy afternoon I put together a Donkey Kong homage to keep my old systems on. The ladders were made from 1/4″ square wood and the barrels are beer cans painted…Turns out having shelves at a dramatic angle causes things to slide off, I vaguely remember something about that in physics.”

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DIY Batsignal

Dec 9

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500x_batlamp

Feel like you are missing something in your life? It’s probably because you don’t have your own batsignal. Fortunately, thanks to Philipp Tiefenbacher, you can build your own with these plans to make a batlamp. Designed around a high brightness RGB LED and an Arduino, it’s actually a general purpose projector that you can use to program your own lightshow. Now, where did I put that laser cutter?

[Thingiverse via Make]

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IKEA Hacked Homemade Bar

Dec 8

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2009-12-05_221640Help an old dresser take a walk on the wild side. Free that furniture from a life of simply holding folded cardigans and T-shirts. Turn it into a homemade bar with this customizable tutorial.

Ubernerkle and his wife were having friends over for Thanksgiving. To facilitate and be frugal, they turned a closet into a dry bar with the addition of some shelving units. Inspired by the simple dry bar, they followed up on the project by turning an old IKEA dresser into an actual bar, and some more shelving units into storage behind their new dresser-bar. Check out the video below to watch the transformation process:

If you have a tale of re-purposing or flat out rebuilding furniture to give it new life, let’s hear about it in the comments.

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Auto Tuning Guitar Pick

Dec 8

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tuner-build-into-the-picThe Stimmmopped is an electronic guitar tuner made to be used as a guitar pick. This uses two LEDs synchronized to blink at the exact frequency of the string you are tuning. Pluck the string with the corner of the PCB and then shine the light on the string you are tuning. As the vibrating string moves back and forth it will only pick up the spot of light when the frequency matches that of the blinking LED. Once in tune, both red lights will appear to be constantly illuminated and immobile on the string.

An Atmel ATmega8 is used to control the device, interfacing with two buttons and a seven-segment display to choose the pitch currently being tuned. Gibson has a robotic guitar that features an auto-tuning mode, but if you don’t want to shell that much this low cost and simple build is for you.

[via Stimmmopped]

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