Eightlines Creations

Experiments in Physical Computing

TGIMBOEJ

Received! One TGIMBOEJThe Great Internet Migratory Box of Electronics Junk (TGIMBOEJ) is a box. It’s a box that arrives on your doorstep after you drop your name on a wiki page and wait a good deal of time. It’s a box that has electronics junk inside and it works off the premise that it could be someone else’s treasure. Find something of interest? Keep it, and drop in some other interesting item.

I received the Blue Bomber TGIMBOEJ the other day from Grant (check out his blog at Splorp) and quickly opened it up to see what treasure was inside.

  • Bubbl#TGIMBOEJ - Should I make a Mousebot?e wrap (My daughter took some to pop)
  • Barbie digital camera (1MP? Useful for sending up a kite for some KAP?)
  • Classic Apple IIe mouse (Taken, going to build a Mousebot)
  • Momentary push buttons (I took two, I’m always short of them)
  • Incandescent indicator lamps (these could be worth something some day!)
  • Male-Female SCSI adapter (I’m guessing? Been a while since I’ve seen one.)
  • Soldering Iron Tip
  • Audio jack signal adapter
  • Servos
  • Printer control board
  • Potentiometers & Control boards
  • Digital Media Players
  • Linksys Router
  • Multi-pin switches (I took 3, but there’s 7 left)

And in the spirit of sharing, I’m dropping in a Solenoid left over from my Water Fountain experiments from last summer, some pin headers, and a section of pixelboard.

I’m due to send the box out to the next person on the list tomorrow, but if you want to participate, add your name to the list! One more tip: even if you don’t want to participate, check out the list for some excellent blogs & projects. There’s a ton of cool projects going on.

August 9th 2009
Tags: Ideas

0 Comments

Power Monitor Packet

As Hugo helpfully commented in a previous post, here is the link to the Power Monitor Patent. The specific page I'm linking to is the Packet model. Lots of reading to do here, but its pretty interesting. One of the things I find most interesting about this patent is the citations ...
July 26th 2009
Tags: Ideas

0 Comments

Building a Scooter Bike for Kids

Ages ago I bookmarked a design posted on Make for a Scooter Bike, as I intended on building one when my daughter got old enough. On a recent trip to the surplus store I picked up a wheelset for $3 and figured what better time to start than now. I ...
June 10th 2009
Tags: Ideas

0 Comments

Arduino Packet Analyzer

Following the previous success where we managed to see the transmissions from the Black & Decker Power Monitor, Andrew Kilpatrick and I went about trying to capture the packets. Without an access to an oscilloscope with packet capture capabilities we built our own with an Arduino. Essentially, the code waits for ...
June 8th 2009
Tags: Ideas, Power Monitor

0 Comments

Black & Decker Power Monitor Hack

Black & Decker makes an interesting product called the Power Monitor. The monitor straps on to your hydro meter and reports the revolutions of a spinning disc or blinks of an IR LED depending which model of meter you have. It then broadcasts that reading to a handheld unit inside ...

Air Quality Monitoring

Recently I had a discussion with someone from the South Riverdale Community Health Centre on Air Quality monitoring in Ontario (AQI). I learned a number of things, there are only 40 Air Quality Monitors in Ontario and they test for six key indexes. Toronto runs a slightly different test, the ...

Search

The archives run deep. Feel free to search older content using topic keywords.