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Building a Zoltar Fortune Teller: Part One

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I have always thought the mechanical fortune teller machines where a thing of wonder and I've always wondered about making one myself.  I have previously experimented with making a proof of concept miniature version here but as I had some spare time on my hands I decided to scale up to a full sized cabinet. I started by rescuing an old wardrobe that was skipped and used the panels to put together the bottom half of the cabinet. The intention is to have the bottom half collecting the money and dispensing fortune cards, with the top half house Zoltar in a framed enclosure. I removed the insides of the miniature fortune teller and made sure they still work. A friend of mine gave me a nice 1d coin panel and I made sure that this worked with the existing coin acceptor. The brains of Zoltar runs off a simple Microbit . I love these little programmable boards, they're easy to use as well as cheap and are perfect for projects like this. The code is surprisingly simple too. The Microbi...
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Building a Ziggy Handheld

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Quantum Leap was an obsession of mine during the 90s and I'm still a huge fan of the show even now. As we'll be off to another comic con shortly, I wanted to try and make another prop to take along to the even and the Ziggy handheld that featured in the original series seemed a great ideas as it would be challenging to make but would be easy to carry around with me on the day. The short video below details how it was made with downloadable resources further down this page. The first thing I did was to pull up some reference material in the form of screenshots that clearly shows the handheld. There are also props that you can buy and the images they had on the various websites were a lot more detailed. From here I was able to build a simple model from within Tinkercad . I made sure I included the main blocks of the design and made up the more smaller components. I thought if I could achieve the general look and outline of the handheld, then it will be easily recognisable. I want...
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FM TRANSMITTER HACK TO BOOST THE RANGE

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I have always thought there is huge potential in transmitting data over the FM bands, especially when it involved one of my kite ideas. I once came up with the concept to fly a bunch of sensors via kites that would relay the information down on the ground via a low powered FM transmitter. This could then be adapted to broadcast your own recordings should you be at the beach with friends and wanted to broadcast your own radio show to the listeners below. There are many similar projects out there, take this Raspberry Pi project  here  for example. After buying a number of the old in-car FM transmitters from a car boot sale recently I decided to revisit this project and test it out only to find that the range of the things wasn’t very good at all. Although the older generation in-car FM transmitters are rumoured to have a better range than the more modern solutions, I was still only achieving a few metres. So I set about modifying the FM transmitter to see if I can boost its r...
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