Recycling and repurposing

It's some weeks that I'm thinking to whether there's a good usage for the stuff we send to trash. Differentiating is the way the region I live in proposes to reduce the amount of waste we generate, but I'm interested in something beyond such concept: is it possible to recycle such stuff AT HOME? Through several brainstorms and googling on the Internet, I found that there's a lot of interesting uses we can make of the materials we throw away.
Let's start from computers and electronic devices. A first thing that we may do is to take electronic components and use them for DIY projects. In such scenario, a good source of information is surely MAKE magazine, with several projects requiring different skills. But one can also design its own solutions, usually with the help of some microcontrollers, such as the ARDUINO. Here you can find the homepage of the creator of such a wonderful device!
For computers, I found a good resource here.
Indeed, the keyword in several uses we may have of useless devices and materials is recycling and repurposing. The website I mentioned above proposes several ways to re-use parts of old PCs for a different purpose. But still the concept can be applied to several other devices that we used to employ on a day-by-day basis and now they're broken or substituted by newer ones. In several cases, the design of old devices was by far more inspiring and pleasant of the corresponding "new" versions.
This concept opens the floor to a whole new world of interesting ideas, several of those which can involve kids, too! For example, papercraft: we destroy tons of paper each year, while paper is the most "repurposable" material of the world! Look at this websites, like Papercraft Museum or the wonderful Flying Pig (yes, they can be animated!!!), and you'll get the idea.
And while writing this post I started to feel the need for taking back the old electronics I had when I was a child... but this is another story. Stay connected for more!

Low cost guitar amplifier

I was actually very curious to understand how it is possible to build a low-price guitar amplifier, and browsing through my old numbers of MAKE I found some good schematics of simple designs to build such amplifiers with around 5$ of budget.

Yesterday I implemented a cracker box amplifier, such as the one described here on MAKE website. I decided to use a breadboard to be more flexible, overall it took me three hours - but it was worth: the clean sound is very good, distortion is reasonable. Everything is built on the low power LM386 amplifier, which does a real good job nearly for free!

Globally, the cost is around 17 euros (I bought the stuff from a nearby electronic market, probably it is possible to get lower prices...). Design depends from the people implementing it, on the left you can see mine! :-)

If you are interested in some additional figures, go check my website.

My first post

Hi! This is my very first post to my newly opened blog.
Here I'll post my ideas and activities for my free time, including DIY projects, online gaming, Internet services and networking.
Stay tuned!