[Arduino EL dimmer in a theater prop?]

I am working on a steampunk rifle prop prototype that if it works well will end up being a large commission for a theater costuming company.

I am planning on hooking up a lightweight arduino to possibly play sounds but mainly to allow dimming electroluminescent tape and wire. Driving EL uses a 110vac inverter that takes 3.3vdc. Changing the 3.3 from the arduino is simple, but im trying to figure out how to modify the 110 side to dim it.

I considered using a standard 1A dimmer switch for a light fixture, but having a small component that I could control electrically would be choice.

Anyone have any ideas?

[Arduino based car start-up sounds]

Just a thought, if you hook this up to your ODB-II connector, you could have it also play TARDIS landing sounds when your RPM falls under say... 5mph?

[Arduino based car start-up sounds]

When you turn on your ignition you are really just supplying ~12vdc to different areas of the car.

You have 4 states:

Off: everything is off

Acc: accessory relay has power, supplying your cigarette lighter port, stereo, etc.

Run: this triggers relays for all of your engine's necessary electrical components. In this state Acc is also active.

Start: this triggers your starter motor and allows your engine to turn over. In this state Run is active but Acc might be switched off as to not overdraw from your battery (depending on your car).

If I were to approach this problem I would break it down into 4 logical steps.

Supply power: I would hook it up to a voltage regulator with a few capacitors to the Run circuit to get a clean 5v line out of the 12v battery line. You could even wire this in to your ignition switch harness directly.

Input: If you pull down the voltage from the Start line and use that as input, if you program your arduino to "arm" when the Start circuit powers up, then trigger the audio when the Start circuit powers down, you can reasonably assume that it wont play the sound until the engine turns over. If your battery starts to die, you might hear the sound a good 20 times trying to get your car to start though.

Output audio: this part is up to you. You could rig up a little amp and a small speaker in the dash if you wanted simplicity, or you can try to hack your head unity. Lots of cars dont have their amps powered while the car is starting to make sure that the starter motor has enough amps. Keep that in mind and be creative.

Turn off: if you do use an amp and speaker in the dash, would make sense to power all that down while not in use.

[Waterproof Flat Panel Touch Screen Monitor For Shower]

Has anyone every built or purchased a waterproof flat panel touch screen monitor for their shower? :) I think this could be a fun project. I'm just not sure about what type of material I could use to cover and seal up the touch sensitive part of the monitor that would still allow it to be touch sensitive.

I think it would be nice to catch some hak5 or other tv shows while in the shower. It's time I could be educated and entertained. haha I would plan to connect it back to a computer and would control via the touch screen, of course. I already have speakers in the bathroom, so that doesn't need to be included in the monitor housing.

Any ideas or thoughts? I'd even be happy if any one pointed me to a product they'd recommend. I haven't searched too much yet as I thought I'd through this out there to the community. I'd though about putting my iPad or iPod Touch in there, but I'm afraid it wouldn't hold up to the moisture, plus I don't want to have to put it in an enclosure and then have to take it back out after each shower.

Thanks,

Smoke.007

Chances are you would have a resistive touch screen (the kind you push on) not a capacitive touch (the kind that reads the electrical conductivity of your skin) really any kind of clear plastic that is flexible would get the job done, even something like cling wrap. Altho I wonder if you wouldnt have an issue with it steaming up and making it hard to see whatever the monitor is displaying?

You could easily get a lilliput 7" touchscreen, I have on in my car and they are fairly easy to set up, only take 12v DC and only pull something like 10 watts peak? I would feel pretty safe having one of those in the shower with me. You could even make a battery pack for it with very little trouble. I would worry about shorting out USB or VGA and possibly doing some damage to your computer tho... Tap water isnt a great conductor but still...

[Creating Hover Effect In Html From Visio Diagram Or Jpeg File]

Hi All,

I'd like to know if it is possible to achieve this scenario for my web design,

I've got company ITIL diagram that I'd like to make it show the hyperlink to a file download for each respective box (mouse hover / over effect) should I create a HTML table for this or create image mappings from the VISIO diagram .vsd file ?

basically what I want is when the mouse is hovering the box, it displays the DIV list of links on top of the diagram only

Does anyone know how to achieve this ?

Thanks

I'm sorry, I dont quite understand. You want to have that diagram on your webpage and have each of the boxes in it be clickable? If I were doing that I think the easiest way would be to make several invisible AP objects (divs/anything really) and give them onclick commands. That is just my first thought and is most likely not the most efficient/best practices approach. Just what I would consider to be the easiest.