Image Sensor For Filling Wine Bottles

A wine bottling company in New Zealand got in touch with [Boz] to solve a problem. They needed a way to automatically determine if a wine bottle was filled or not. What he came up with is a very simple yet very effective fill level sensor that can scan thousands of bottles an hour.There were a few design...
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Mustachioed Rover Simultaneously Manly, Adorable

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[Rick], an Adafruit learning system contributor, is excited by the implications of STEM’s reach into K-12 education. He was inspired to design Red Rover, a low-cost robot that can be easily replicated by anyone with access to a 3-D printer. This adorable autonomous rover is based on the adafruit Trinket microcontroller,...
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Once, Twice, Three Times a Nixie

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Try as he might, [Localroger] can’t seem to throw away a certain board that started life in one of the first digital industrial scales, the NCI DigiFlex model 5775. He recently gave it a third career as a nixie clock with an alarm.[Localroger] says the board dates to about 1975. It’s all TTL, no microprocessor...
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Running Custom Code on Cheap One-time Password Tokens

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One-time passwords (OTP) are often used in America but not so much in Europe. For our unfamiliar readers, OTP tokens like the one shown above generate passwords that are only valid for one login session or transaction, making them invulnerable to replay attacks. [Dmitry] disassembled one eToken (Aladin...
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IR Theremin Speaks In Four Voices

At the end of every semester, we get a bunch of cool and well-documented student projects from Cornell’s ECE4760 class. [Scott] and [Alex]‘s infrared theremin is no exception. The classic theremin design employs each of the player’s hands as the grounded plate of a variable capacitor in an LC circuit. For...
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Automated Drink Mixer Is the Life of the Party

Hosting a New Year’s Eve party, but don’t want to be stuck behind the bar all night? You could set out a bowl or two of spiked punch, but where’s the hack? Free yourself from drink slinging duties with the Automated Drink Mixer created by Cornell University students [Justin] and [Austin]. Their design uses a...
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