So every so often I get the opportunity to do some creative or problems solving physical projects at my day job. Yep I have a day job… inventgeek is not my day job. But hey we try awful hard for about a week every month for you guys! So this month I thought I would publish a how to article for the infamous meeting light project I put together. At our office we had a little problem with meeting consistently and I have been rather interested in lean manufacturing for years. Basically what we produced is a Kanban or a visual indicator of a status that those around the area can see to act as a reminder for us. It acts as a great reminder for the team as well as blends into the funky environment we have.

Due to popular request we have built this miniaturized ion cooler as a second step in its evaluation. We chose to use an external design for several reasons, all of which mitigate concerns from people on our initial prototype. One of the biggest concerns was with regards to the air moving threw the computer possibly having a imbalanced electrical charge or alternately producing to much ozone and possibly damaging components in the system. By mounting the unit at the rear of the case with it sucking air out of the case we are able to still achieve beneficial results and address these issues. The rig overall is basically the same as in the initial tests with one change that we used a more standard PC case with a normal 2 fan push pull type arrangement.

With the introduction of the dancing gaming systems here in the states there has been huge growth with in the community. The problem that anyone who is truly interested in the fitness gaming revolution is the gross difference between the home console and arcade dance pad quality. Even the super high end dance pads that cost 500+ are not considered a long term or heavy use choice by our local community. So I set out to create a dance deck at an affordable price rang that would even trump the arcade quality units.

I never really understood the mentality of someone that overclocked there computer for actual every day use. Sure, I have overclocked the hell out of computers and had a lot of fun doing it. It can give you a great edge in the gamming circles. But this group of overclockers using refrigerants and liquid cooling on an ongoing basis?. Well it seems a little unnatural to me to save 50.00 on a CPU to get a lesser one to overclock and make up the difference at the risk of the whole system? but some where in there is that self destructive geeky tendency we celebrate screaming to the surface. So with all the focus on making a cold computer case, I decided to make a case into a drink dispensing refrigerator just in honor of the hard core overclockers.

Inventgeek.com has a all new look! check us out and let us know what you think.

The idea for this project evolved out of necessity. Dan and I are both avid gamers. After a few hours of gaming with our normal high-end mouse pads you get a build up of sweat. The mouse and mouse pad becomes slippery and you start to loose your competitive advantage due to the loss of precision. While there are a couple mice on the market that have small fans in them to dry out your palm, they all have major failings in precision and accuracy. So after some thought and discussion we chose to build out our own custom mouse pad with a blower in it to suck the air down through the pad and away from the gamer?s hand. The result is astonishing!

As a way of saying thank you to all of our fans, as well as to celebrate our first month that we have broken one quarter million visitors. We would like to introduce the first Inventgeek ?ideas? contest. The gist if this contest is really simple. Come up with an Inventgeek style project idea and submit it, and if we choose it you win! We not only will do our standard how to article for it, and give credit to its originator, but the project we choose to do will win its submitter a brand spanking new black iPod nano

The inventgeek forums are officially live. So if you have an idea to talk about lets hear about it!

Project Silver (Project Rogue Server) is a how to article on building a stealth server. Both software and camouflage are used in this plain sight deception.

Its our pleasure to introduce you to our newest member of team inventgeek. Daniel Williams has several years of experience in Mac, Unix, Linux, and embedded technologies. Basically if its mainstream (also know as ?Microsoft?) he doesn?t spend much time with it. He is more interested in developing and modding technologies with open source solutions. We will be posting his first project very soon titled ?Project rogue server?. We can no doubt expect great things from Dan and look forward to his other projects, as I am sure you all do as well.

It is in one of the ethically murky recesses of humanity that I have felt like delving into with this project. Any type of project that effects perception of security and stability of life is never popular. While lock picking is nothing new, for those who know nothing about it, it often shocks and scares people with its ease and sharp reality.

We have added a new section to the site called Inventgeek in the media.

Well, after a lot of Resarch and Development, we are proud to bring you the force feedback simulator mod! Its been a lot of fun to build and tinker with, and we get to poke a little fun at yet another large demographic.

Those of us that have used LCD monitors for a while know that over time the backlight starts to dim and will eventually completely fail. Leaving you with some electronic scrap that you could sell on eBay for 35 bucks or so. Well for less than $20.00 and about a half hour of your time you can replace the backlight and rejuvenate that monitor to as good as new condition.

Time for another flaming monstrosity, How about nice Xerox laser printer converted to a high volume automatic paper shredder? This project was featured on 8/3/05 on toms hardwares how to section. Now, here it is, un-cut and un-molested by the Toms Hardware "editors" in all its sarcastic glory!

Inventgeek.com has conducted a broad Projector Panel Breakdown. If you are looking for a LCD panel for your projector take a look.

This project came from a challenge I was given by a fan of InventGeek. Basically they chose the most common place and mundane item they could think of and challenged me to improve it in a practical way. So how do you improve a bread box? Well for starters I how about making it more useful than just a nice place to put your bread and we are not talking about putting a computer in it. After modding out our bread box I think we have come up with something terribly practical. Worst case then we have come up with a really clever science fair project for you your kid to do.

Today I realized that we haven't published many articles this year on invent geek because the articles and projects we are working on are larger in scale and require a lot more time and resources that our typical past articles. However I wanted to publish a simple article detailing one of our boards we have put together as an accessory module to one of our larger systems that will be published soon.

This is mostly just a fun article that I wanted to write for the simple reason of accessible information for anyone. Basically this is a example project that demonstrates how extremely easy it is to use the Arduino based platform to control high voltage devices via a webpage. This type of concept has many practical applications from home automation to office pranks. While in this article we will demonstrate this concept with a single relay controlled outlet this can easily be scaled up to control up to 15 separate relays with minimal cost using the components used in the base project.