Archive for category Projects

Illuminated Snowflake Ornament

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

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

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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

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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iPhone Car Dock

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So I’ve been looking to awesome out my car with a decent dock that’ll integrate my iPhone into my car. I’m not looking for anything special, just something to hold my phone and keep it within arms reach. I also want to charge my phone when it’s juice is low and stream some tunes. I bought a griffin TuneFlex for around $35. It worked great. It has an integrated 3.5mm audio out and charger. The CLA (cigarette lighter adapter) has an attached goose neck extender that swivels and stays in position. The dock portion (let’s call it the seat for the sake of this article) is mounted on a connector which rotates 360 degrees and ratchets/locks into 9 preselected positions. This solution was perfect, I used a cassette adapter plugged into the 3.5mm connector of the TuneFlex to stream music from my music library and Pandora.  After a few months of awesome, the ratchet mechanism stopped doing what it’s supposed to… ratchet and lock. The techy nerd in me wouldn’t accept such desecration to the finest technological advancement of modern history… yea, that’s right, the Iphone. Read the rest of this entry »

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