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Membership Box - pulses

In the image above, you can see a few of the pulses output by the NV10USB bill acceptor.

While we do have the option of reading the bill validation data over USB, the pulse output is just so much simpler to work with. It should be a simple matter to hook the output to the interupt pin of an Arduino and simply count out pulses.

I set the NV10 to output 1 pulse for 1000 yen, 5 pulses for 5000 yen, and 10 pulses for 10000 yen bills.

Membership Box bill acceptor training

That smily faced slot is a bill acceptor. It is mounted in a box, which will soon be a membership payment system for the Tokyo HackerSpace.

A while back, I ordered a NV10USB bill acceptor, made by Innovative Technology. They are in the UK, but I ordered the machine from a retailer in China.

Weatherstation

I recently found this weather station strapped to a tree near a the Akabane-Bashi train station in Tokyo.
I sort of feel sorry for the tree. At least they wrapped it up good first. :)

Exploding glass

Materials science can be fascinating. Take glass for example. Apparently, whn molten glass is dropped into cold water, the drop becomes incredibly hard. So hard that it is nearly impossible to break it. However, the tail of the drop acts similarly to detonation cord on a stick of dynamite! One little nick and the whole drop explodes in a shower of tiny glass fragments.

Arduino and TI-MSP430

The Ardunio development environment (Wiring) has changed the way we do things in the microcontroller world. It is no longer necessary to deal with make files, configuration tools and so many lines of code just to set up the serial port so you can print "hello world." By obfuscating all the hard bits that go into just bringing up a micro to a working state so you can write some code in the main.c file, the Arduino made entering the world of microcontrollers so much easier for artists, hobbiests and young engineers.

Receiving satelite weather images

Was browsing hackaday today and saw a post about NOAA weather satelite images. I realized I never posted my own experinces here, so I thought I would go ahead and document it.
First off, it is important to remember that this all came about due to a number of different factors: My brother had actually bought two EZCap SDR tuners because he was interested in scanning police bands and some other stuff. He had mentioned he had them, and by then I was already aware that one could tune in the frequencies required for satelite reception.

file: 

Quiz Show controller

Here is a shot of the insides of my quiz show box.

Lots of space in there! The arduino is bolted to the metal base plate. The shield is only there to provide a strong attachment point for the wires. Unfortunately, I only had solid core bell wire, so the cabling is quite stiff and hard to work with. Next time I'll use ribbon cable!

Gakken Steam Engine

I recently recorded two videos about the Gakken kits available in Japan, in particular, I show off the Gakken steam engine.

 

 

Educational Space Games

Just a short late night post: I have been thinking about all those fun sci-fi and educational games I played as a kid..

Thought I should start making a list of modern educational games.

So, here is the Space sim list. I have not played most of these yet, but am checking them out.

 

High-tech Wheelbarrows

Another article passed along from the Tokyo HackerSpace. (Read the full article at Low-tech Magazine.)
This one is all about wheelbarrows. In specific, the Chinese center wheel barrow.

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