Saving the TiVo
A couple of weeks ago, I started hearing some funny noises from our Series3 HD TiVo. Sort of like an engine periodically revving up then stopping. I said to my husband, “The cooling fan is going bad.” But we ignored it and eventually the noise went away. Until, a few days ago, the TiVo got stuck at […]
Replacing an ethernet cable jack
A week ago my 4 year-old daughter bounced on the bed and knocked off my laptop. The laptop was fine, but the ethernet cable had some minor damage. The plastic tab on the RJ-45 plug, which holds it in the computer socket, snapped off. At first, this didn’t seem like a big deal. The cable still worked well. […]
Lighting up the Speed Vest
With the circuit board wired up, the ribbon cable in place, and the electroluminescent wire connected, the Speed Vest was ready for its first end to end test. I used the sample code supplied to have the Arduino run through each of the output pins, lighting up each strand of wire to make sure everything […]
Learning to use heat-shrink wrap
With the ProtoShield wired up and the ribbon cable prepared, the next step for the Speed Vest was attaching the electroluminescent wires to individual strands of the cable. This was rather fun as it was my first chance to try something I’d been interested in for a while, heat-shrink wrapping. I paid my Coolight, my […]
How to make a ribbon cable
If you’ve ever worked around computers, you have seen IDC ribbon cables before. They are extremely common. So when I saw that the SpeedVest required a 14-wire ribbon cable with a 2×7 female header, I figured that I could simply get one at RadioShack or order it online. Turns out, it is not so simple […]
Constructing the Speed Vest circuit board
The electronic circuitry for the Speed Vest is fairly simple. A high-voltage, low ampere power supply lights up strands of electroluminescent (EL) wire. Each wire corresponds to a digit on either the left or right side of the vest. We use a microcontroller, the Arduino Duemilanove, to read input from the wired wheel sensor, calculate […]
Making a Speed Vest
When I got volume 19 of MAKE magazine I saw a project that I immediately wanted to build. Called the Speed Vest, it is a cycling vest that shows your speed in glowing neon as you pedal. I like to bike and I wanted to start an electronics project, what could be better? Here is […]