Build a digital stompbox

Basically a stompbox is nothing more than a wooden box with a microphone in it on which the musical performer stamps the rhythm with her or his foot to produce a sound similar to a bass drum. But today, in the connected-objects world, it wouldn’t be nothing, nothing without an ESP32 or I2C-OLED display. Electronics engineers make musicians happy, 'cause they make them toys. You too can make a musician happy by building this toy.

Startup Mayku has designed a handy desktop vacuum former to form a plastic sheet around a 3D model. All you need is a sheet of thermoplastic material and a household vacuum cleaner to generate the negative pressure and draw the heated sheet around the 3D single-surface mould...

If you ever need a large display to keep the score for games, or a counter for sports events, this is the thing to build. With its four tall (10-cm / 4 inch) 7-segment digits it can be read easily from afar. The project is based on LEDitron modules, i.e. 7-segment displays built from LED filaments as found in modern lamps. And sure, it doubles as a clock!

Darts is definitely much harder than it looks – perhaps it has something to do with that fact that this game is often played in bars and the accuracy tends to be inversely proportional to the beer consumption...

The 2018 edition of the Tour de France, the world’s most famous bicycle race, starts next week. If you are going to follow this event you will hear and read a lot about the categories of hills and mountains and the steepness of slopes. But how to relate that information to the slopes you encounter when you ride a bike yourself? How tough is your workout compared to the pros? With this little project you can find out.

We have a look at the ‘Smart Video Car Kit for Raspberry Pi’ manufactured by SunFounder, a kit for a small Raspberry-Pi-based Wi-Fi-remote-controlled car with color video camera. We built one and tried it; here are our findings and tips.

Taiwanese startup Cubiio Muherz ran a successful crowdfunding campaign last year on Indiegogo to finance a mini desktop laser engraver. By campaign end, it had raised 55 times the target to fund production of the project, but there are still a few perks available on the campaign page...

Even though LoRa is intended for communication between devices at the surface of the earth, nothing forbids us (except maybe regulatory agencies) to use it vertically, between a flying object like a (weather) balloon and a ground station. Here is a way of doing this.

Sometimes you get really odd projects touted on crowd-funding sites. One such novel ‘device’ that appeared recently on Indiegogo promises free electrical power, I think I’ve seen one of these before, if I remember correctly it was titled something like ‘So-Called Alternator Magic’ (SCAM) device...

Deep discharging of lithium-ion polymer (LiPo) batteries to under 3 volts per cell may permanently damage them. Luckily it is easy enough to build a deep-discharge protector using a microcontroller. Here is a design based on an ATtiny84 programmed in Flowcode.