Hacks, Mods & Circuitry: Page 6

Power the clocks at your home with the sun! With a solar cell that costs around $5, you can convert a clock to solar power and avoid buying batteries or running up the electric bill. Instead, connect a rechargable battery to the solar panel with a few wires and some adhesive and soon you'll have enough energy to power your clock for as long as it lasts.

Make a bionic hearing spy device by hacking a megaphone! Kipkay brings you this hack video on how to use a megaphone to spy on people. You can pull in conversations up to 100 feet away! Check out Kipkay hiding in a tree, spying on people. It also works through walls. That's how to make a bionic hearing spy device!

Build your very own Trek-style Blu-Ray laser phaser with this hacker's how-to video from Kip Kay of Make Magazine. To replicate this hack at home, you'll need the following materials: (1) a PS3 Blu-Ray laser assembly (which can be had on eBay for roughly $45), (2) an original series-style Star Trek phaser gun (a good quality replica of which can be found for roughly $30), (3) a 9-volt battery, (4) a 9-volt battery snap, (5) a 150 Ohm resistor, and (5) a new switch to replace the phaser trigger....

Make a cool confetti cannon that's great for concerts, parties and special events! Kipkay demonstrates how to hack together this high powered cannon. Confetti bombs are super fun, pay attention to learn how to make your own confetti cannon.

If you own or have access to an auto-ranging or manual-ranging multimeter you can measure several different aspects of circuits, resistors, and the like. For example, you can determine the resistance, voltage, continuity, and current with the multimeter to help you determine the precision of a resistor. This guide will help you learn how to use a multimeter to perform these tasks.

Sometimes an "analog" result is highly satisfying when the means for producing it is just the opposite. Enter Niklas Roy's "Electronic Instant Camera" project. The endeavor combines an analog black and white videocamera with a thermal receipt printer. The outcome is something in between a Polaroid camera and a digital camera. Like the olden days, the subject must sit still for a quite a while—3 full minutes—as their image is recorded and printed directly on a roll of receipt paper.

A few months ago, we showed you a pretty awesome light painting project that visually captured invisible Wi-Fi signals around town using a Wi-Fi detecting rod filled with 80 LEDs. With some long exposure photography, the results were pretty amazing. This project was inspired by those crazy Norwegians, but this build lets you do something even more amazing—capture pictures of colorful written text and drawn images, frozen in midair.

You're sitting in your favorite café enjoying a hot cup of joe, then you open up your laptop or turn on your tablet computer to get to work, but as always you get sidetracked and head straight for Facebook. Someone just tagged you in a photo, so you check it out, then you see it out of the corner of your eye—your Facebook picture digitally displayed on the wall in a nice, neat digital photo frame.

Got a knack for speeding? Like running red lights? Believe or not, the police have better things to be doing than pulling you over, like catching real criminals. That's why more and more cameras are popping up at known speeding zones and on street corners—so the cops can clean up the streets, compared to just ticketing them.

This video will show you how you can manipulate the benchmarks captured by Quadrant on an HTC Hero. Watch this video to learn how to cheat benchmarks on your Android smartphone. Any software can be modified, which is why Quadrant doesn't always accurately rate hardware performance.

Our hacked Kinect series has demonstrated amply how the Kinect is changing the worlds of business, art, medicine and robotics. But where does it go from here? That will be determined by the thousands of dedicated DIYers out there doing work like you've seen here over the last week.

E Ink technology is nothing short of amazing. It recently contributed to the world's first bend-sensitive flexible smartphone, and now it's capable of something even cooler, not to mention astonishingly simpler—flashing digital displays on cloth.

Were you horrified when Gwyneth Paltrow's head ended up in a box in Se7en? Do you share Harrison Ford's opinion that Han Solo should have died in Return of the Jedi? Think Kurt Russell could have handled aliens better in The Thing? Well, sorry—you're out of luck. There's nothing you can do to prevent William Wallace's beheading or Carrie's mayhem. But thanks to MyndPlay, controlling the plot to future films is totally possible.

You're walking down the street, minding your own business. Then you see it—a large, bright fireball in the near distance. A tremendous heat wave speeds towards you at one thousand miles an hour, and before you can think, before you can even blink, the extremely heated wind pushes right through you. Your skin melts, your eyes liquefy—your face disappears into the wind. Before you know it, your pancreas collide with what's left of the person next to you, your duodenum is dissolving faster than it...

Matt Reed, a web developer at Nashville interactive ad agency Redpepper, built a massive, real life Facebook Like "button" out of Legos, which lights up whenever someone clicks Like on his Facebook page. The programmer loves LEGOs, and draws an affinity between the legendary building blocks and engineering: "[Legos] are great for prototyping physical objects. I don't manufacture things, but I do click blocks together. Plus, most things I deal with on a daily basis are pixelized. Legos are some...

The capacitor is one of the most recognizable and important electronic components, and a part of nearly every electronic device. This video will teach you the basics of capacitor theory and then teach you how to replace a faulty or broken on on a circuit board. This skill will help you fix all sorts of devices you thought were dead forever; try it out!

An amplifier is something that amplified the voltage on a circuit. The most basic kind is an operational amplifier, and this video will show you how these work and how to use them in your electronics. As an example you'll learn how to make a microphone circuit for spying on people or listening to your heartbeat.

Musical boxes are best known for their kitschy designs and somewhat trivial renditions of musical masterpieces. They tend to frequent the dresser of young girls or elderly woman hanging on to their youth, and for the most part, they remain cutesy and harmless, but when featured in movies like The Silence of the Lambs and Black Swan, they become downright creepy.

A voltage divider is one of the easier-to-understand pieces of circuity in use in modern electronics. They divide voltage, and are crucial to most modern electronics. This video will show you how they work and how to build one yourself for your circuits.