After nearly a 30-year absence from the hobby electronics market, the Texas Instruments SN76477N Complex Sound Generator IC is now for sale at BG Micro. It's just like 1973 all over again. Bomb blasts, propeller sounds, snare drums, and sci-fi sound effects will all be back in vogue with the return of this super synthesizer chip.

I/O, I/O, it's off to develop I go!

Sure, it might sound cheesy, but the new UBW32 is a low-cost development board that sports 78 I/O pins! Roughly the size of a big stick of gum, the UBW32 is literally ringed with I/O pins.

Our friends at Evil Mad Science (the storefront for Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories) have created a great little game machine for soothing those financial scars wrought by the recent economic downturn. Forget the line madness on Black Friday and fighting tooth and nail over the local box store’s solitary Wii.

Making some noise, triggering a sound effect, or, even speaking a word or two inside a DIY project can be an arduous task of trial-and-error hexadecimal array programming. Sure there’s the digital alternative from Magnevation, SpeakJet, but you still have to tackle that programming chore for converting phonemes into words. Ideally, you should be able to speak a word, “ON,” and it’s in your project, ready for use.

Are you looking for that little extra "something" to kick your entry up a notch in the upcoming PopSci/Instructables Halloween contest? Then you might want to consider some professional help. No, not a therapist, rather a Cordless Pumpkin Carving Tool by Dremel.

Carving's its name, and pumpkins are its game.

What's better than RFID tags? Your own fingerprints, of course. No batteries needed, no electronic eavesdropping devices, and no storage problems. They're always convenient and, well, they're always at your fingertips. The only problem with using fingerprint biometric controls is finding a suitable fingerprint reader. And, no, we're not talking about that archaic monstrosity used at the local cop shop, either. We're talking about an small, inexpensive fingerprint reader that just needs a swipe of your precious digit for unleashing a torrent of programming power.

Want to add some extreme zip into your next model airplane project?

Who says science isn't fun? Build this 5-minute rocket and you'll have hours of fun. Plus you might learn a thing or two about propulsion systems and rocket design along the way.

As we mentioned in our earlier post on the Esquire E-Ink cover, we have uncovered some additional details regarding the operation of this interesting E-Ink evaluation board set. There are two eight-stage shift-and-store bus registers (HEF4094BT) that drive each of the two E-Ink panels. The PIC12F629 controls the state of the HEF4094BT outputs: positive voltage, negative voltage, high impedance off, and shift register stage.