(Some of which might be dangerous. So do them at your own risk)
This website dates back to the early 2000's. The images are small because data and connection speeds were restricted in that era. The images were taken with a Mavica floppy disk based digital camera!
Make a glitter lamp.
Build a custom glitter lamp with your own choice of glitter.
Make a custom LED lamp.
A really neat decorative mains powered LED lamp that costs only pennies a year to run.
Crack the ice on your LEDs.
A simple way to give ordinary focussed LEDs a much wider viewing angle.
Convert tungsten Christmas lights to LED.
How to convert old tungsten push-in Christmas lights or fairy lights to LED.
Use a tracker to find wandering family.
A guide to using standard cheap GPS trackers to find wandering elderly relatives.
Make sweet alcoholic potions.
An unusual diversion for this site, based on the tendency for technically minded people to like sweet alcoholic drinks.
Hack an LED lamp.
Modify a common Chinese LED lamp to run at lower power with much longer LED life.
Hack a USB light.
Hack a USB light with new LEDs to change the colour for backstage or decorative use.
Make solar window lights.
A super simple and super cheap project to add a splash of solar powered colour to your windowsill using two commonly available items hacked together.
Hack your Aerogarden.
Adapt your Aerogarden to take standard compact fluorescent lamps instead of the expensive proprietary ones it normally does.
Make Nixie Stix.
An odd project for making sticks of small neon lamps that jitter about randomly inside.
Make a police light for your bike.
Change a harmless LED bike light into one that allows you to impersonate a police officer and enjoy the thrill of speed, running red lights, eating donuts, arresting people and getting thrown in jail for impersonating a police officer.
Hack solar garden lights.
Change the colour of the LEDs in cheap solar garden lights, and mix colours too. Can also extend run time by reducing battery current.
Make a confetti lamp.
Like a glitter lamp, but kinda "fluffier". A very simple lighting effect with lots of confetti swirling around in a glass bottle above a lamp.
Make Nixie flowers.
A mains voltage project to make cute little neon flowers. If you want a safer version, check out the low voltage LED version below.
Make a candle powered lava lamp.
Hack an existing lava lamp into a handy candle powered one for convenient power-free lava-lovin'.
Stop your Xmas lights flashing!
Stop those pesky Christmas lights from flashing permanently by shunting out or replacing the horrible little controller that came with them.
Make LED flowers.
Make cute little LED flowers that glow in a very pleasing manner.
Make a scrying mirror.
A bit of a wildcard for this site, a scrying mirror is a jet black mirror used by fortune tellers to gaze into the future.
Make a $20 ozone generator.
Make a surprisingly effective ozone generator for freshening the air in your home or workshop.
Make a miniature RGB controller.
This is a rather neat miniature version of my bigger RGB controller kit. This one is perfect for building into stuff and has a simpler range of programs.
Make a power saving plug.
You may have seen these amazing plug-in power savers on the Internet.
Learn how to make one and reduce your electricity bill by up to 35% (apparently).
Make your own teleport transponder.
Take holidays galore with this highly illegal teleport transponder unit that has been hacked to operate on all four official molecular transfer frequencies plus the two military and two research frequencies. This project carries a risk of explosive demolecularisation.
Make an LED plant.
Make a rather pleasing solar plant that has glowing tendrils that twist into an existing tree or bush.
Make a flame thrower.
Hack an automatic aerosol air "freshener" so that it spits out fireballs every 9 minutes.
Hack an air "freshener".
An extra stinky project that lights up too.
Take a cheap plug-in aroma air "freshner" and make it glow in your desired colour and/or refill it with a more natural aroma oil of your choice.
Light your fireworks remotely.
An experimental style of page with bigger pictures and video.
This is an extremely cheap and easy way to fire your home fireworks electrically like the professional displays.
Make a simple RGB LED array.
Make a neat little RGB cluster. Ideal for use with my RGB controller kits.
Make a Joule thief.
This device is the equivalent of a lemon juicer for batteries, and will suck every last frickin' mA of current from an AA or AAA battery previously destined for the bin.
Make a knob based RGB LED controller.
A rather neat little controller kit that allows you to change the colour of LED panels by rotating a knob. Also contains an automatic random colour generator.
Make an LED ornament.
Make a customisable spray of plug-in LEDs where you can mix and match the LED styles and colours any time you like.
Blow up Smarties.
Yo! Put that chocolate (in a crisp sugar shell) into orbit.
Only Smarties have the answer?... Well answer this you bastards!
Make an automatic RGB LED controller.
This little gem will control a surprisingly large installation of LEDs, and offers a large selection of complex and stylish programs. It's sophistication and simplicity puts many expensive architectural controllers to shame.
Make some ozone.
Then sniff it.
Mmmmmmmmm, fresh.
Make a superflux LED floodlight.
A very neat 54-LED panel that fits into a standard 150W halogen floodlight case.
It can be built as an RGB colour changing panel or as a single colour panel making it suitable for solar lighting applications or even hydroponic grow light use with red/blue LEDs.
It's designed for use with the RGB controller above, or it can be used on its own.
Blow up your last Rolo.
Observe how the chewy toffee centre fails to act in a chewy manner when exposed to internally concentrated explosive forces.
Make an LED wash-light.
The perfect compliment to the RGB controller. This is an MR16 sized PCB that will acommodate nine superflux LEDs (three each of red, green and blue) to give a very nice wash of colour mixing light. It's ideal for mood lighting.
Make metal candles.
This is a pretty cool toy I came up with while messing around with oil and wicks. It's basically re-usable metal candles that burn for ages on ordinary cheap vegetable cooking oil.
Make pyro "sprinkles".
What better way to finish your barbeque than with an act of pyrotechnic stupidity that will probably leave holes in your guests clothing.
Blow up a bag of Hula Hoops.
So you thought the most exciting thing you could do with Hula Hoops was slip them over your fingers and attempt to bite them off without suffering bone fracture?
Well this technique may allow you to fracture every bone in your body using just a single Hula Hoop.
Make LED "charm" lights.
This is kind of neat. It's basically a rag-tag assortment of acrylic "things" with LEDs resined into them.
Add a custom wiring loom and you've got a neat string of LED lights.
Make LED colour changing lights.
These great little modules fit directly into standard MR16 downlighter frames and give you state of the art colour changing wash lights.
See the newer version above!
Make LED floodlights.
"If it's worth doing, then it's worth doing with excess."
A much larger scale project to match the controller in the project above. This is a 180 LED colour changing floodlight that is fully enclosed in a waterproof outdoor casing.
See the newer version above!
Hack a fibre optic display.
Take one cheap battery operated fibre optic spray, and convert it into a stunning LED version that runs directly from the mains without a transformer.
Make an ioniser.
Fill your place with negative ions.
It's just like being next to a waterfall on top of a big mountain just after a thunderstorm (apparently).
Make a USB turd.
This is a fully firewire compliant, fibre optic illuminated shite.
When plugged into a vacant USB port, the turd will light up in a magnificent display of high-tech poop.
Make a USB toitle.
A toitle?.... Yeah, a toitle!
Or in fact absolutely any transparent object if you have no desire to have a plastic turtle stuffed into your USB port.
Hack an Alkalite ripple projector.
Take a groovy LED based ripple projector and rip out it's badly designed guts for replacement with something more appropriate.
Make a fuel magnet.
Just apply to the fuel line in your vehicle and start saving cash.
Make a tingle-tron.
You won't be able to put it down... (literally!)
It's just a cute little box of electro-sado-masochism.
Make colloidal silver.
An easy way to create a fine suspension of silver "ions" in water.
This can then be consumed directly for it's reputed medicinal properties, or used as an anti-bacterial agent.
Make a pyro FX controller.
The commercial theatrical pyrotechnic firing systems are very expensive. This simple design is perfect for firing Le Maitre effects, and includes a safety keyswitch and a device monitoring LED.
Blow up a bam board.
Not the safest of devices. This is a circuit board specifically designed to fail dramatically when connected to the mains and provoked. Makes an interesting "bad" coffee cup coaster.
Make a blazing torch.
You've probably already got everything you need to make this effect.
It's a simple outdoor effect that gives a large flame for use as a light or just for effect in your outdoor party.
Make a lava lamp.
Not like the recipes on the Internet that don't work though, this took a lot of messy and expensive research. The results are better than some of the commercial units.
Make a cloud lamp.
This is the perfect use for the remains of the lava lamp you just experimented on.
It's a very cheap and easy to make lighting effect that gives the effect of clouds continually forming and disappearing in a bottle.
Make a DMX tester.
Here's a simple project for the lighting crew... A simple plug-in device that will let you trace a DMX signal through a lighting network.
Make a cheap neon tube supply.
Primarily intended for 240 volt supplies, this cheap and simple DC multiplier runs about 600mm of 12mm Argon/Mercury tubing.
Grow your own LED Bonsai.
Yeah, you wish! Unfortunately this project required tons of LED's and time.
Make a chandelier.
Just like the really expensive designer halogen ones, but completely dangerous.
Make a monstrosity of great luminosity.
Take a small plastic hamster ball and end up with an artistic statement of such high luminous output that it requires sunglasses to view directly.
Make your own smoke fluid.
Not the modern clean fresh smelling stuff though, but the old fashioned stinky glycerol version that leaves yukky residue and has a tendency to hang in the air like the proverbial bad smell.
Make extreme shampoo.
See? Even something as harmless as shampoo can be "boosted".
Build a wearable pixel.
You just won't believe how good this looks, especially in blue. The tiny NiMh battery is good for many hours of operation and can be recharged using a dangerously non-compliant (but cute) mains charger.
Energise Centaur.
This ones strictly for the pinheads who have done their bit for pinball history by saving a Bally Centaur from the scrapheap. This page shows the retrofit PCB that I designed for the machine to replace the existing "Say It Again" board.
Explore a stungun.
Just how do they generate 100kV from a 9v PP3 battery?
A brief insight into the technology behind these fearsome little boxes of body tingling fun.
Make a high voltage Jacob's ladder.
This is the dodgy effect seen in the old black and white horror movies... It appears as a metal vee shape with sparks zipping up it making the popular VVVVIT! VVVVIT! VVVVVVVVVIT! noise.
This version uses a third Gabriel electrode to make operation more reliable.
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