After walking off and forgetting about my soldering iron enough times, I decided I needed to get some kind of timer that would automatically shut it off. I did a lot of searching thinking that something like this should already exist, but I couldn't find anything. I found power strips and little timers where you could set the time of day to turn on and off, but nothing with a simple wind up count down timer. Having seen wind up timers installed in bathrooms I checked the hardware store...

From the same post on Reddit as the other one I found out about these IBoard Arduino compatibles . They were the same price as the previous two that I got, $29, but these are a little bigger and have more built-ins. In addition to the Ethernet port and XBee ports, they also include a MicroSD slot. These boards are about the same size as a real Arduino, a little larger than the XBoard. They are 3.3v based which I'm not sure yet how difficult will be to work with. They also have used up all...

This is my Tektronix 453 oscilloscope being used as a miniature vector monitor for Atari Tempest. It took a bit of fiddling to figure out what settings I needed to put on the scope to make this work so I took a picture so I could easily reference it. There's supposed to be a Z input which would control the brightness but I couldn't get it to work. Either because my probe was flaky or because the levels from the board didn't match what the 'scope was expecting.

Thanks to a post on Reddit I found out about these Arduino compatible boards with built-in Ethernet. They are called the XBoard V2 and they are made by DFRobot. These boards are 5V based which in theory will make it easier to interface with them than a 3.3V based board. They are very tiny! I was expecting a board the same size as the original Arduino which is already pretty small. (The arcade tokens in the picture are just there for scale, they are the size of a US quarter, 24mm.) I've...

Just received a pair of little wireless Bluetooth serial modules in the mail today. They came from Dealextreme and arrived in just under two weeks which is pretty fast for them. I saw them on reddit in /r/arduino and for under $9 I figured that was a pretty cheap option to tinker with wireless on the Arduino or Teensy. Bluetooth modules with cable They included a cable but to hook to an Arduino I'll need to replace the connectors on one end with something that has pins. To plug into a...