The Railgun 2 is the sequel of the first railgun that Sam Barrow presented on his website, the Powerlabs. A railgun is a linear magnetic accelerator, a device that can basically fire any small metallic object at an incredible speed, using a huge amount of electrical power.

The objective of this railgun is to, as stated on the railgun 2 page, to

successfully design and construct a linear electromagnetic accelerator capable of accelerating a lightweight payload to velocities greater than 1000m/s so that hypervelocity erosion in the rail/armature interface can be studied and a means for minimizing this erosion be investigated.

The railgun 2 is the result of 3 years of research on the subject. From what I have understood, it works by first accelerating the projectile with compressed gas, then it accelerates it more using a very strong magnetic field generated by the mean of electricity.

If you want to learn more, run to Sam's Powerlabs railgun 2 page !

The photo in this post is from the Powerlabs website and is published here with Sam's kind permission.

Mike's Electric stuff is a website mostly full of crazy high-voltages projects. Mike is a freelance electronic engineer that usually design low power microcontroller-based devices... but in his spare time, he likes to play with various high-voltage things. When playing with some high-voltage generator, he invented a new musical instrument: the spark-o-phone was born.

This interesting device uses some resonant tubes and a high-voltage generator. When an electric discharge, a spark, is done in one of the tubes, the latter starts resonating and produces some sound in a certain frequency, determined by its length, its diameter, and other physical parameters. By controlling in which tube the discharge is done and when, some interesting musical patterns can be done. The results are promising, however I think that Mike should hire a compositor

Read more on the Spark-o-phone webpage on Mike's electric stuff. Do not hesitate to browse this website, as it was quite hard to choose what to publish here !

I don't happen to find interesting websites each day. However, I do have some favorites, and I will start by publishing these.

There are some fearless dudes on the Internet that play with mains voltage, and who creates usefull and... useless things. One of them is the so called Big Clive, who shows on his website (http://www.bigclive.com), in the "Things to make and do" section, some of his creations.

It was rather hard to choose one of his inventions, but I will speak about the Joule Thief (which is an useful invention !). These days we are having more and more environnemental problems, and we try hard to reduce the power we use. One challenge is to light up our houses at night, without using kilowatts of power. New technologies appeared in the last decades, and they have been improved a lot since their creation. One of them is the fluorescent lamp technology. Fluorescent lamps are efficient, but their life is limited, from 6000 and up to 20000 hours (according to Sylvania website, one of the most known brand for fluorescent lamps - link)

There is a new technology that is becoming more and more popular as it improved: the LED technology. LED stands for Light Emitting Diode: a LED is a diode, a simple electronic component, that can emit light when a current flows through it. Some brands like Nichia, Lumileds and others have created very bright LED lamps, but they sometimes require a high voltage (electronically speaking) that can be hard to obtain especially from tiny battery powered devices. LEDs have important advantages over the other technologies: they do not waste a lot of power into heat, and they can last for long ! For example, some Lumileds models can last up to 100000 hours.

Big Clive adapted a small electronic circuit he has found in an electronic engineering magazine to fit in a small, common bulb, which light up thousands of models of portable lamps. This circuit allows the incandescent filament to be replaced by a LED, and it is so small that it can fit into the bulb itself ! Using this clever improvement, one can easily convert a power-wasting incandescent torch into an efficient LED-based torch that will last much longer than the original, unmodified torch with the same battery. Big Clive called his invention the Joule Thief because it is so efficient that it can light up a LED from a nearly totally discharged battery !

Read more about this invention at Big Clive's website here.

The two photos in this post are from Big Clive's website and are published here with his kind permission.

I have always loved to disassemble, and possibly improve each thing I have. And I'm not alone ! During the last years, I have regularly found personnal websites including informations about interesting and original hardware or software modifications that people have done. I have also found some original and clever inventions.
I am only interested in modifications or inventions that were done by individuals, not by companies with huge R&D funds.

I will publish some of these hacks in this blog, in the hope that it will give you some ideas, and maybe you'll end up with a clever modification or invention that could be published here ! Now that the DIY directory is born, I have to fill it. It will be a long and permanent task, but I hope that you will enjoy browsing through this list.