Pages with tag DIY

Build your own DIY portable wireless TV from spare laptop parts

Want to build a portable "TV" video display unit? An old laptop screen serves as a great starting point for building a display panel, and an HDMI driver board makes it easy to connect the display to a computer. The next step is adding a battery pack, making it portable, using a pair of voltage regulators to set up the 12 volts and 5 volts required to power the components, and an external charger to recharge the batteries. A sound bar is easily buildable using a set of small speaker drivers and audio amplifiers. The "television" portion is a question mark, however since it's nearly 2020 we can easily connect this to the Internet for video streaming using a Chromecast or other HDMI gizmo. The parts can be easily enclosed in a case, and voila you have a complete and portable video display system.

DIY Solar powered Weather Station [WiFi, MQTT, Smart Home, ESP8266]

Why spend a zillion dollars on a commercial weather station that doesn't do what you want? With some time and ingenuity you can design and build your own weather station.

How to Make a powerful DIY wind generator from an old e-bike motor This video shows a DIY project to build a wind generator using an old electric bicycle hub motor. While the design has a couple flaws - such as how to avoid twisting the power cord around the mast - the result was able to provide power to run this guys entire house.
How to Make the Ultimate 18650 Power Bank with Infinitely Expandable Capacity Why should commercially made power banks be so expensive and so small? This DIY powerbank can be built by anyone at a fraction of the price of commercially made power banks. This unit can power not just USB devices, but 120 volt AC devices, it charges over USB or USB-C, and contains voltage displays. This plan reuses a lot of commercially made components. What makes it work is some highly customized 3D-printed parts from which the case is built.
How to make a relaxing "false window" light panel (using old laptop screens) Old laptop screens have bright backlights. It's fairly easy to remove the LCD panel from the laptop display, and then take off the LCD portion, allowing the backlight to shine fully. This video shows how to construct a "light panel".
How to make a super bright LED light panel (for video work etc) Here's how to make a super-bright LED light panel. It's equivalent to a 1000w incandescent light bulb, and it's super useful for video work as it has a daylight colour temperature and doesn't use PWM for dimming. There are 900 individual LEDs in this panel, which is why it's so bright.
Make a DIY ring light for DSLR or other cameras

Ring lights are used by camera buffs for macro-photography. It's an excellent way to light the subject of the photograph from the same angle of perspective as the camera lens. This is important for avoiding shadows. It's also desirable to have a softer light than a regular camera flash.

This DIY project inexpensively builds a circle of LED light units into a form that can be easily screwed onto the front of a camera lens.

See this amazing ultra-quiet ultra-powerful custom Intel i7 PC build

An ultra-powerful PC with high end CPU and high end graphics is supposed to be loud because of the cooling fans, supposedly. In actuality an ingenious air cooling system coupled with low-noise fans can keep even a high-end system cool while making essentially no noise. Watching this makes me think of Apple, whose attempts at low-noise ultra-powerful machines look pale in comparison to the visual esthetics of this computer.