I came across this awesome game on Hack-a-Day, it’s basically debug the circuit and save the world

Ruckingenur II

While there are only 4 levels, and you don’t necessarily need an official nerd card to play, it was still a very fun alternative to traditional puzzle games!   Let us know if you decide to download/play it.

A friend of mine asked me for some help with a power supply for a DVD laser diode Maglite that he was interested in building.  We followed the basic instructions as provided by Instructables:
Maglite DVD Burner Project

We built a basic regulated supply and came up with this:

Of course we had a spare pair of laser goggles in the lab and were able to make cardboard smoke on demand:

I think there’s a reason that I won’t be building one of these for myself, but I am considering combining about 5 diodes and the 2 axis CNC (Computer Numerical Controlled) mill at work to create a laser etching system for really cheap - now I just need several junked DVD burners. . .

Sometime last year I was buying parts for a project and decided to purchase a grab bag of ceramic capacitors thinking that it wouldn’t be any big deal to dig though them and turn them into a useful assortment of parts.  There are a few logical breakdowns here:

When you buy the “grab bag” you’re really buying a bag of about 20 values of capacitor, in a really disorganized bag which renders the bulk of what you’ve got useless.  So it comes down to you really just need a 47uF capacitor, and you’ll never find one because there isn’t one in there

They take forever to sort and even when you’re done you just have a slightly more organized 6 piles of random component values instead of one huge pile!

Finally, there’s probably a reason they ended their lives as “grab bag” capacitors - in this case a lot of the components look like they’d gotten stuck somewhere in a piece of equipment, they were all roughed up and missing chunks of ceramic, hardly something you can identify much less feel good about using.

Organizing a Mess of Capacitors

Seeing as we are a group of computer-oriented folks, I think it’s appropriate that our first news update begin with the ever-classic “Hello World!”  (Plus, it’s the default title of the demo post, so I didn’t even have to change it ;-))

With that welcome out of the way, two major items of news to report at the moment.

1. A new homepage for Enlight.  Welcome! I’ve set our site up with a content management system, namely the excellent open source package Wordpress, so that we can focus our very limited web updating time on content rather than infrastructure.  We all have busy lives, but hopefully now we will be able to keep you, the inquisitive vistor, up to date a bit more easily and often!
2. A homepage for and significant progress on our largest project: the Maquina Fountain.