As for lighting, I use a clip-on desk light, fitted with one of those little fluorescent bulbs, with a custom shade made out of an old cereal box and some tin foil.
I suppose this project was an excuse to try it out. (All the image editing was done with Picasa 2 and Paint, just for the sake of being cheap and showing that anyone can take decent pictures of their projects.) Forgive how basic it is, I was just looking for something to do while lunch was cooking.
On to the second project: Adding an antenna terminal to a cheap FM transmitter. (It's the screw.)
<img src="http://img215.imageshack.us/img215/4805/demo2ka7.jpg">
We got a couple of these in the mail as some sort of promotional giveaway, and they came with some cheap headphones. They're both really light, cheap, and plastic-y, like just about any electronics you can pick up at Dollar Tree. The headphones don't sound very good (decent mid-low ot midrange, nonexistent treble), but the transmitter looked like something fun to play with.
Unmodified, it could transmit about 25 feet, through 2 or 3 walls.
Guts in stock form. Not much to it.
Boards unscrewed from the case. Now it's really obvious that there's not much inside this thing; just a coil, some surface mount transistors, and a blue LED (probably the most expensive component). These types of transmitters usually use the ground pin of the headphone cable as its antenna, and this one is no exception. (Snip the wire and it doesn't transmit nearly as far.)
TV antennas use spade connectors (flat, two pronged), so I found a nut and screw that fit. The back of the unit had enough room to drill a hole, and only needed minor snipping to get it to close again.
I drilled a hole, dry fit the nut in place, and used the screw to hold it where it belongs. Then the antenna wire got cut, extended, and soldered to the nut.
A bit of everyone's favorite molten adhesive protects the connection and holds it in place.
By this point the screw and nut really hot, and managed to embed themselves in the plastic a little. It almost looks like it belongs there!
I hooked it up to my PC, threw in some batteries, and hooked up an old TV antenna before testing its range again. This time I got another 15 or 20 feet out of it before the signal completely cut out. Not a bad improvement considering the power output wasn't increased. At this point it would be easy to hook it up to a cable amplifier, but it would probably block out most of the FM band for about 100 feet.
Useless? Yeah, pretty much. But it was fun!
(Besides, the lightbox was really the point. Build one and your pictures will improve.)
