Hack Your Kids Toys
TechnologyOne of the many many toys our children have is a Lullaby Light Show, you wind it up, it plays music and lights up stuff on the ceiling. The problem is that it uses 3 D cell batteries. When they ran out I decided I could make it better.
I picked up a $3 LED flashlight from Frys and proceded to rip it apart to get the LED and batterries. I then opened up the toy to figure out where I could connect wires to complete the circuit.
Once that I connected the wires to the batteries and LED. Since I don't have a soldering iron I used the next best thing. Old speaker wire, duct tape, and hot glue.
Here is the bottom of the toy opened up after I had connected all the wires.
A closer look
Here is where the LED is housed.
To finish it off I shoved paper towel in to keep it from bouncing around too much. You can also see the leftovers of the flashlight housing.
All closed up, I present to you the finished product. Now not only does it weigh a lot less but the batteries should last at least until they no longer care about this at night.
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USBCell - The batteries of the future
TechnologyOK, so they are not that futuristic, but it's ideas like this that make me drool. Most of use use batteries all the time for one thing or another. I know I go though countless batteries and while rechargeables are good for at home, when you are on the go, bringing the charger can just be a huge hassle. So someone thought about the power sources many of us take with us or have access to somewhere and USB came to mind, it is on every computer, modern game consoles, even some TV's have USB ports. So with the combination of a normal AA battery and USB a new era was born.
Enter the USBCell, this wonderful idea allows you to take the charger with you, because it is in the battery.
I ordered a set of 2 for use in my camera. Currently they are charging in my laptop, I have read that these do not get the same amount of charge compared with regular batteries, but I am going to put that to the test. I am going to take as many pictures as I can with these and then compare it with some regular batteries. Until I do that I am going to continue to this that these are totally geeky cool. I love them.
I will get back to you on how effective they are.
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