Ultrasonic Range Finder with Arduino

I recently got a Maxbotix LV-EZ4 Ultrasonic Range Finder to try understand how to use it with my little Arduino. Having a ultrasonic range finder can be very useful in many different projects, as it can detect objects, I can use it to make alarm systems (cars usually use this kind of sensor), Obstacle-Avoiding Robot and many other things that you may have in mind. It works better outdoors then the IR sensor, but the only thing I could notice is that it doen’t detects very well some thick carpets. Besides that, it’s a great sensor. From the datasheet we can read that it sonar range information from 6-inches out to 254-inches (15.24 cm – 6.452m).

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The history of hacking

If you have 50 minutes of your day, you really should watch this Discovery Channel`s Documentary, about the history of hacking, about the Phone Phreaking. Amazing!

10A on a .7 graphite -> ElectronicsLab.org

Hi, me and some friends from university, we just started a new blog called electronicslab.org where we will add some cool things we do over the weekends and holidays, also telling our discoveries and learning’s. Down, you can watch a short but really cool video (at least was cool making it), were we connected a 0.7 graphite to a power source and made 10A go through it!

Don’t forget, add www.electronicslab.org to your rss reader and get ready for some cool stuff

Solving problemas with PhPMyadmin on Ubuntu

You know, everytime you want to install LAMP + phpmyadmin on Ubuntu, you can simply write on terminal:

Ok, you are ready to go, but the only problem is that you can’t find the phpmyadmin folder when accessing http://localhost/ you can’t even see the folder at /var/www/ . So what you should do is:

It will link the phpmyadmin folder from /usr/share/phpmyadmin/ to /var/www/phpmyadmin
now try going to http://localhost/phpmyadmin and you are good to go!

Energy efficiency a MUST

Review: Lacie Pocket 500gb External Drive

Some days ago I bough the Lacie Pocket 500gb external hard-drive, and since then I have been very happy with my purchase. The HD is small enough to fit any pocket in my bag (3.19 x 0.71 x 5.08 inches [WxHxD]) and with the weight of 3 pounds, it makes easy to take everywhere. I know that having an external notebook hard-drive isn’t the safest way to store you precious data, but its a great place to store music, videos and photos in which you can take anywhere. At home I have my HTPC (Home theater PC) with a lot of free storage, so what I do is, I have a backup of all my data on the external lacie drive, and another copy of my precious things on my HTPC, this way I hope all my information is safe (I am also thinking on having another copy on the clouds [amazon s3]). Everything is backed up using a simple bash script made by me that will make copies to the external drive and to my media center via FTP.

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Arduino Wallpapers

Just having some fun with photoshop, I made a wallpaper for the Arduino lovers out there. If you have any ideas or different color you would like to have it, just leave a comment with the #code you want.

Hope you liked

[1024x768] [1280x1024] [1280x960] [1280x800] [1600x1280]

MAKE presents: The LED

As you might already know, I am big of a LED fan, love all it’s light power and low power needed for that. While viewing the RSS from
HackZine I saw a great short video about the history of LEDs and a little about how to use them. I liked, and decided to share with you, hope you likes as much as I.

In case you would like to learn more about leds, you can visit HowStuffWorks and on Wikipedia.

Some projects I’ve used with leds:

HowTo: Blinking LEDs
HowTo: Make your own Metronome
DIY: Binary Clock with Arduino

Watch out for Twitterank.com

Hey everyone, watch out if you want to try twitterank.com, it seems to be a scam!

WordPress on the Apple macbook event

While following the coverage of Apple’s macbook event at gizmodo, I found one picture that I think is worth sharing,
they took a shot from people writing stuff about the event… And from few notebook screens I could see there, at least 3 using wordpress. Thumbs up WP!!

BTW, new macbook’s looks amazing, can’t wait to get one of those!!!