Hi, this is Paul. Mark is my dad. Here's a project we made. It works great.
What we did was take apart something and found a circuit board with an LCD. We took off the LCD and found its back light. It was a really cool-looking blue color. We figured out how to hook it up to a battery. We cut off the rest of the circuit board in the wood shop so we just had a little more than the part with the back light.
Then we needed a way to hold the circuit board. We used the back of a power inverter my dad blew up. It looked really cool because it had a lot of holes. It also had one end bent over so it will stand up better. We used a metal clip we found as a base for the opposite side so it stands up good. We found a switch that just happened to fit perfectly in one of the holes.
We soldered everything together with wire-wrap wire (super thin wire). We hot-glued the circuit board to the top of the power inverter part. We wired together two AAA batteries and then glued them to the base.
I really like taking junk and turning it into something useful. My dad said it's called re-purposing (hence the name of the blog entry).
Tell us about it if you make your own. Hope it works.
