-- Hey guys, look what I made. I put a ball bearing in the center of this flat multi-lobed structure so that it can spin along its axis. That’s all it does, it just spins and I am going to sell billions of ‘em. -- Sure you are, dude. Now go away. The rest is history and even at Elektor Labs we encounter fidget spinner projects. This particular project combines the fidget spinner with a persistence of vision (POV) LED display. Will it be ready before the hype is over? Or will it create its own hype? Decide for yourself.

Although its operating principle is really very simple, the first time you see a solar-powered​ Mendocino motor you can’t help being fascinated. It looks like it came out of a wizard’s den — hovering in mid-air and spinning on its own, apparently without any source of energy. The ​magnetically levitated electric motor, named after the Mendocino County in California, is powered by solar cells. It uses a rotor suspended on low-friction magnetic bearings.

What do you do when you go biking and run out of energy after a few hours of activity? You take a slug of that sports drink you carried with you especially for this purpose. A sports drink is supposed to recharge your batteries and give you fresh energy to ride those extra fifty kilometres. Now what if this happens to your E-bike instead of to you? Enter the Range Extender, the sports drink for E-bikes.

This Precise Nixie Clock from Elektor synced by GPS displays the time on six nixie tubes and comes with a very finely laser engraved transparent acrylic glass enclosing, with brass tubes and blue back light. The new design uses IN-12 nixies. If you wish to use other types of nixie tubes, it is easy to assemble your own display on veroboard.

Browsing Elektor Labs from old to new I came across an interesting project from 2013 to transform a remote controlled cable car into a Wi-Fi controlled car. At the time Wi-Fi modules (and martphones) were still new, expensive and a bit complicated to use, but today, thanks to the ESP8266 adding Wi-Fi to any device has become cheap and easy. So, why don’t you let this project inspire you? Find an old (or new) cable car and turn it into a cheap, Wi-Fi-controlled car.

There’s no doubt a 3D printer is a useful tool for electronics engineers. You could for example use it to print a missing lid for some housing etc. It’s difficult however, to justify the outlay for such a machine that you will most likely only use occasionally. How about if it costs less than $ 100? The BuildOne, is a 3D printer with Wi-Fi for just $ 99!...

Cheap ISM-band radio modules are great for making simple remote-controller toys. When a greater degree  of control is needed, for instance when running servos for controlling a model plane's rudder, elevator, aileron and a brushless motor while at the same time receiving feedback from each of those actions, you need something like this 4-Channel, 2-Flavor Remote Control with XBee or nRF24 radio modules.

Programming a traffic light controller on a microcontroller is not too complicated, and an easy job for Arduino. But, wait a minute… it can be done even simpler if you could program it as a PLC with a ladder diagram. There are more people out there that know how to program a PLC than who know how to program an Arduino. Besides, a nice open source compiler for doing ladder diagrams on PIC and AVR micros is available for free, so let’s give it a try.

During a visit from some friends recently I was trying to think of some interesting activity for the older children in the party who seemed to be looking a bit bored. It dawned on me that they were about the right age for the Velleman Solar Energy Experiment Kit I had bought recently. The prospect of actually making some physical experiments definitely got a positive reaction, they stopped swiping their screens…

Many people who "do" electronics as a pastime or as a career feel the urge to convey their knowledge and experience to the younger generation. To do that, all sorts of systems have been proposed, but only few are as simple as the one presented here. Draw a schematic on a sheet of paper, stick it on a piece of wood, at the wire junctions hammer in some nails, then solder the parts to the nails. Great fun and not unlike the way radio and TV electronics got assembled in the fifties and sixties.