Just about every household gadget we own runs on 1.5 volt batteries of one size or another. Wouldn't it be great if you could reuse all of those dead AA, AAA, and D batteries after they've passed on? It turns out you can make a simple circuit called a "Joule Thief" to reanimate the undead flesh of your deceased batteries and create a zombie battery.
Before there was digital music and fancy computers and music software, people use to employ the power of the electric color organ (now more commonly known as the "light organ") to add some visuals in sync with their music. MAKE shows you how to build your own sound-to-like circuit— your very own light organ!
Many types of circuits are useless and less useful if you cannot control the amount of power going through them. For that, you need a PWN (pulse with modulation) switch. This electronic component will let your control the power going through the circuit, enabling you to dim LED lights, control the speed of a motor, and other useful tasks. This video will teach you all PWN switches and how tom make your own.
What a unique bow. Your gifts will be beautiful under the Christmas tree. Materials you will need are: plastic wrap, hot glue, LEDs, scissors, pliers duct tape, glue gun and glue, toothpicks and 3 volt batteries. First you take the plastic wrap and cut it about 5 times the size your bow is going to be. Take the end and push it together. Now make one side of the bow, push together, and make the other side of the bow. Keep going back and forth until the plastic wrap is at the end. The left over...
In this tutorial, we learn how to install Recon LED Strobes and HIDs on a truck. You must first learn where each of the tires need to install and make sure they are placed in the right direction for what you want the lights to look like. After this, you will connect one side to the white wire on the positive. Then, you will leave the white disconnected on the other side for the flash to alternate between each of the lights. These will look great on a big truck! Just make sure to follow the di...
Black lights come in all shapes and sizes, and they're useful in a variety of ways. They can help you spot fake currency, urine stains, interesting rocks, and deadly scorpions, and they can even help you view cool fluorescent artwork.
Afraid of the dark? You're only afraid of things you can't see. Just like an owl, see through the darkness, light up your imagination, and use your own owl eyes to make your very own Halloween hoot. To make this owl, you'll need black foam board, an X-Acto knife, LED lights, battery-powered closet light, and curtain rod.
Obviously, millionaires like me don't really have to worry about an empty wallet, but for the rest of you out there, having no cash when it comes time to paying a bill can be excruciatingly embarrassing.
At night, it can be pretty difficult to see what's inside drawers and cabinets, unless you have night vision or something.
In the past few weeks, you've already learned how to make your bike light up at night with some DIY rim lights and handlebar lights. But how about something a little more functional? Instead of using those tedious hand signals (which drivers don't even understand), spruce up your ride with some do-it-yourself LED turn signals.
This video teaches us how to prevent those pesky paparazzi from invading our privacy. It suggests buying a pair of safety glasses that have lights attached at the sides. Then, remove the lights, and replace the existing resistors with higher-powered ones, and the lights with infrared LEDs. When the press tries to film you while you're wearing these at night, the cameras will see bright, menacing lights where your face should be. This how-to is presented as a joke, but it would be hilarious to...
If you're having a hard time using any of the ranges or the oven on your stove, it may be because of the pilot light. This is an important part of the appliance that allows it to work correctly. No pilot light, then you'll have a hard time cooking anything.
The LED's mounted behind the big X button on the XBox 360 are not very bright and kind of a bland vomit-like color. Why not replace them with a royal blue or perhaps fire-engine red set? This video will show you how to mount whatever new LED lights you wish on the control board inside an XBox 360 controller. This will give it some much-needed flair and make your controller distinguishable from those of your friends.
Richpin demonstrates how to test an alternator with a standard multimeter. First make sure that the vehicle's battery is fully charged. Take the negative lead of the multimeter and put it on the negative post of the battery. Place the positive lead of the meter on the positive lead of the battery. Set the meter to DC voltage using the 20 scale and read the display to ensure the battery is fully charged. Next start up the vehicle and see what the alternator is producing. The display should now...
By using LEDs that only put out a little light the eyes can be lit in dim room light but still appear white, the moment the eyes are in shadow they glow bright red. Watch this video tutorial to see how to make glowing LED creature costume eyes for your film or costume project.
In the pursuit of large displays with thinner bezels, Samsung has sacrificed some components. While the loss of the headphone jack gets all the attention, there are other victims — namely, the notification LED.
Android is all about customization. That's why it's entirely appropriate that Spark for Android's newest update adds a ton of customization options for your out-of-control email alerts. Now, you can add lights, sounds, and vibrations to notifications, and you can even set specific settings for all of your email accounts.
LEDs have slowly become the standard for DIY lighting projects because they consume less power and last way longer than regular light bulbs do. Light-emitting diodes have no filament, meaning they generate their light solely by the movement of electrons in a semiconductor material.
This week, Bre Pettis teams up with Mitch Altman and George Shammas to make a little 3x3x3 cube made of little LED lights that you can program with any kind of animation that you like.
Hack a car photo to be a really awesome decorative object for your home or office at a very low cost. It's also really fun to make! All it takes is a few LED lights and a 9V battery.
A cool way to test a LED bulb emitter! Plug it in to your multimeter and see it light up. It's really cool!
In this video, one of the gentlemen from the London stunt team 3Run shows us how to do a front flip. This is a very impressive trick that sends the performer spinning forward over the ground. Common sense would lead you to think that this trick requires a lot of strong, fast movements, but as the performer demonstrates, it's all about a light, delicate touch.
Usually our 5-Minute Projects involve soldering and LED lights and other such electronic accoutrements, but this week we decided to skip the fancy stuff in favor of an old-school science project: making rheopectic slime from Borax and glue. This is a pretty safe experiment even for kids--just make sure to do it with parental supervision and keep the Borax, slime, and any fingers that have been touching the aforementioned items out of eyes, noses and mouths.
Whether it is damaged in a storm or you're just replace an old one with a new model, replacing an exterior light fixture can help the overall look of your home. It's an easy job that can be done in less than an hour, but it's very dangerous.
We fight cancer in a variety of ways, but no matter whether drugs, biologics, or our immune cells are part of the battle, they can do a better job fighting back cancer if we can help them find the tumors.
Using my Nexus 7 tablet as a flashlight to light my path on the way to my room late at night is difficult, and honestly, useless. It doesn't have an LED flash for pictures, so using it as a flashlight is essentially just me brightening the display as high as it can go.
Do you have two dollars and a water bottle? Then you can put together this simple but awesome solar-powered lantern that will provide more than enough light to read by at night.
This video tutorial will show you how to apply four styles of lighting. This video teaches you how to apply four styles of lighting, namely Rembrandt, Beauty, Cameo and filling in from the Key Side. You will learn about high contrast lighting schemes, dealing with the amount of contrast used to highlight a person's face, as well as spotlight effects, and how these tend to draw the viewer into the scene. You will be shown how the Rembrandt Lighting setup contains three steps, namely taking a K...
Though many were hoping for it, a notification indicator around the Galaxy S10's front camera punch hole never came to fruition. Since then, we've been finding other uses for the camera cutout, from turning it into a circular battery meter to using creative wallpapers. Thankfully, there's now an app that will give you LED-style alerts with a ring around your S10's camera.
Like Russian Matryoshka dolls, the features on the Galaxy S8 and S8+ often have hidden components within them that add to their functionality. The phone's flashlight is a great example of this since there's a hidden shortcut within the "Flashlight" Quick Settings tile that lets you adjust its brightness level.
Riding your bicycle at night is dangerous on busy streets, especially if you've got no bike lights. In most states, it's illegal to ride your bike at night without any lights because drivers on the road won't be able to see you until it's too late. Plus, how is anybody going to notice your sweet ride without a little illumination?
Simple yet effective, capacitors come in a dizzying array of forms and materials, vital to so many circuits for storage, timing, and filtration - the mighty capacitor!
Videomaker Associate Editor Tom Skowronski explains how four basic steps can be used to improve the lighting effects for a video and give it a more professional look.
Three point lighting is the key to MAKING videos look professional. Tom Skowronski, the associate editor of Videomaker, guides us through the process of three point lighting. Three point lighting involves the use of three types of light to create a professional appearance when video taping. First, a key light is used to provide bright illumination of the subject. Then, a fill light cleans up the dark areas on the face. Lastly, a backlight fills serves to separate the subject from the background.
A light meter can prove to be an invaluable tool on any film set, allowing you to quickly and efficiently set lights and know the correct exposure values of those lights. Light meters were initially designed for still photographers and cinematographers can easily calibrate them to a given film stock speed for shooting film. But what about today’s digital cinematographer? I’m glad you asked. In this video tutorial you'll see how you can use a light meter to quickly and efficiently light a scen...
No light no movie. Indy Mogul teaches you how to create your own basic lighting kit for $25. Also covered are lighting basics, including three-point lighting.
While the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 has an integrated LED for notifications, it only works for a few things, like charging and low battery, and it only flashes two main colors (red and blue) when the screen's off. As someone that usually has their phone on silent or vibrate, it's hard to tell when I receive important messages or notifications. Sure, I could set a specific vibration or ringtone for individual apps, but that can quickly get annoying and distracting, especially at work or school.
The mighty Arduino microcontroller can be used to show children how robots work, it can be used to hack into hotel rooms, or it can be used to let you know when you've got a new job opportunity!
I always found that those safety lights for bicyclists on the market were never good enough when riding in the dark. That got me thinking about people who use wheelchairs and how unsafe the night could be when they want to go out. So here's what I came up with:
Ring Lights can create a specific lighting that brings out warmer hues from your actors/models, as well as giving you a cool effect for the eyes. If you're not looking to spend a fortune on buying an already made one, you can make one with items from around the house on the cheap, if you have to buy everything you need, you're looking to spend around $100 which is much cheaper than buying one brand new! Check out this video for a full tutorial on how to build your very own Ring Light!