Like everywhere else in the US, my electric company, Southern California Edison, subsidizes compact fluorescent light bulbs for sale at local markets and hardware stores. My two favorite recent subsidies have been a .99 cent LED desk lamp and a .99 cent jelly jar-type compact fluorescent outdoor lamp. The LED desk lamp I transformed into a decent enough accent light for a painting, while the jelly jar lamp yields a dusk to dawn photo sensor packed into a nice little plastic box, easily removed for higher purposes.

Posted at 9:07 pm on Jul 29th, 2008 by Marty Capella

I dont usually buy shit to mod/hack, its more like trash/flea market/yard sale find. I have stacks of keyboards and other random shit (to bend/mod) that my wife is probably going to kill me over….Lens/optics collection?

-for the hand I would try to make some type of music visualization, I dont know how fast the fingers open/close so I dont know whats all feasible..

-Maybe a rear-dash mounted “middle finger at will”
Lights in it to drAW attention?

Posted at 9:34 pm on Jul 29th, 2008 by 36chambers

Where is the cheap HMD?
I can’t find where to buy it for $49.

Posted at 9:48 pm on Jul 29th, 2008 by hak8or

you could make thing from the Adam’s family.

most of my random junk is old computer parts, but you’d be amazed at how handy spare LAN cards can be, and modems are fun to microwave.

Posted at 10:03 pm on Jul 29th, 2008 by Dylan

I think I would hook the hand up to a bio-feedback sensor and have it provide visual feed back of my mood to my co-workers.

Posted at 10:04 pm on Jul 29th, 2008 by Robert

I’m betting most readers have a pile, or several piles of junk. From old hardware not yet old enough to be recycled/thrown away(or is now ‘retro’), to random gifts that would be good to take apart, to stuff bought specifically for hacking.

Lets see, my list of ‘Now what should I do with this?’ includes, several Mattel Juiceboxes (ARM7 processors with up to 8MB of RAM), pretty much every console-in-a-box that I ran across on clearence (most intended to made into portable systems), several smaller embedded x86 systems (Socket 370 most common) of varying states of working, 9V Li-Ion battery packs, and piles of normal computer parts that don’t quite make a decent system (like a Socket 370 MATX board that is locked into using only Celeron 400Mhz processors, 4GB harddisks by the pound, an entire box of Celerons at 366Mhz)

As for the hand, there was a feature on it when it was more expensive on Make:Blog, should have plenty of suggestions there.

hak8or: it was part of a “Woot-Off”, limited quantities that are sold out, or sell a certain quantity, before moving onto other products. Check Woot.com , as there is a small chance it, or a similar HMD might come up. Also, google ‘woot tracker’ to keep up without having to manually refresh.

Posted at 11:11 pm on Jul 29th, 2008 by tom61

With a hand like that I could make the worlds coolest back scratcher.

Posted at 11:38 pm on Jul 29th, 2008 by pokie2

I bought the DLP Light Engine for a NEC SX-10000 HD projector (three DMD chips, and their driver boards, the peltier cooling on each chip, the prisms, and the cooler controllers)… the thing cost me $12 on ebay since no one else bid (and that included shipping)… I plan to, for a Senior Project, try to make at least one of the DMD chips produce a basic image… then make the other two do the same. Only $12 and that already is the best deal I could get for the components if it doesn’t work out.

as for the hand, make it actually play an instrument, (or use it for that decoy everyone’s been making in their back room for your cubicle, the hand would make it seem like the decoy [or you, to your boss] is typing and not suspect anything… enjoy the days off)

Posted at 11:58 pm on Jul 29th, 2008 by dajjhman

you should make it display text in sign language. thad be sweet. or get another and make them play an organ… if only kuz organ rules.

Posted at 12:17 am on Jul 30th, 2008 by guitar1337

I am about the same with the pc parts but my wife drags me away from skips as I am known for bringing all sorts of rubbish home from outside.

As for the hand I would turn that into a wank bot lol!!!!!!!!

Posted at 12:20 am on Jul 30th, 2008 by arash

Kinda looks like there’s just a single motor and the fingers are on cams that would make them move in a set patter. If that is the case, hacking it to do anything other than speed up and slow down would require ripping out most of the insides.

Anyone seen one up close?

Posted at 12:50 am on Jul 30th, 2008 by Xander

I have enough cell phones and parts to supply a small army.

Posted at 12:56 am on Jul 30th, 2008 by George

Yeah, where is the $49 HMD? cheapest I’ve seen that MyVue is $149 refurbished, $200 new.

As for the hand, spray it with silver paint and attach it to a short metal pole and you have yourself a poor mans animated Terminator arm – halloween prop anyone?

Posted at 1:12 am on Jul 30th, 2008 by Haku

I own 3 Robosapiens (including a v2 i bought on woot. 1 is half dissasembled, 1 is missing its entire outer casing and its entire head. So far, nothing actually been done with them. The third robosapien is so that when i do get around to doing something, i dont have to use one I ripped in half trying to figure out.

Posted at 1:51 am on Jul 30th, 2008 by MrGlass

I’ve raided electronics closets from old and current employers and have stacks of old wires, connectors, cards, a TrackIR Infared HeadTracker, a Sony Glasstron HMD, A Dual-Well CD Recorder/Dubber, and many other techno-bits. I got a set of 5 LED disc lights at a hardware store for a few bucks and modded them to be case lights, added a temp display for a grill as a CPU heat meter, and various Green Laser Diode hacks. Can’t get enough of the junk! I think I’d have to try to build some sort of Text-To-ASL device with this hand.

Posted at 2:11 am on Jul 30th, 2008 by M4CGYV3R

Ive got 4 furbys, 2 new ones 2 old ones, so far they’re skinless and thats about it, but they have a future!

Posted at 2:40 am on Jul 30th, 2008 by Paul

Two large ikea dressers, three sets of little organizer drawers, about a third of my remaining bedroom floorspace and a dynamic haul in the trunk of my car are all overflowing with electronic stuff that looked more than hackable.

The favorite bits include a operating room style equipment arm, a 2hp blender, Parts from powered windows, two 20lb pure Teflon cylinders, this breaker-flipper of a light that pivots and has a switch marked “solar ray – off – heat ray”, a functional drill press that the garbage man would’ve made off with, an overbuilt ptz camera with 20x optical zoom, and all of this epic scsi equipment from a thumper truck.

Most promising is probably the scsi equipment. A buddy of mine rescued the stuff from a metal recycler, but he had to be speedy so he only got a carload of the little bits. He’s anti-clutter so I ended up with most of it. Lots of drives and redundant power controllers and stuff, but also these funky boards with beefy relays on them. They look like the most promising home automation component ever.

Should’ve seen it when we first got them. He was like “I’m bringin’ SCSI back”, and doing this horrifying Justin Timberlake routine up until I saw what he had in his trunk. I stared a bit, then he said he’d kill me if I started singing “my humps”.

Sorry for the rant. Before I shunt my flow I think I’ll plug the ultra-pertinent T. Edison quote, “To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.”

Posted at 4:59 am on Jul 30th, 2008 by Solenoidclock

Does the hand make an awful cheap-motor-and-gearbox sort of grinding noise? If so, my first act would be to silence it as much as possible.

Following that, articulate the fingers individually. Using cord that alternately wraps/unwraps around a motor would probably allow for individually addressable digits (so to speak) with a minimum of fuss.

Once you’re done with that, a binary clock that uses finger up / down to show 1s and 0s :) You’d have to encode the time in an arduous way though (somehow compress it in to no more than 32 at a time)

Posted at 5:35 am on Jul 30th, 2008 by ex-parrot

Binary clock in a great idea, ex-parrot! Gets my vote!

Posted at 6:53 am on Jul 30th, 2008 by Scott McDonnell

eliot, too bad about the Animatronic Elvis. I have been hacking into him for about the last two weeks. I have a custom cartridge built, decoded the audio and animation formats, and dumped and analyzed the main flash.

I thought the animatronic Elvis would be added to my pile of stuff to hack someday, but this one actually stuck for once. :)

Posted at 6:55 am on Jul 30th, 2008 by Scott McDonnell

Oops… forgot the link
http://www.robocommunity.com/forum/thread/13761/Elvis-Cartridge-has-been-hacked/

Posted at 6:59 am on Jul 30th, 2008 by Scott McDonnell

I have an emate (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/emate) and an IR laser (http://www.flickr.com/photos/jbgeekdad/2541639146/) that I’ve been meaning to play with. That’s on top of a HUGE amount of additional crap.

Posted at 9:18 am on Jul 30th, 2008 by John Baichtal

i’d like to see the hand integrated into one of those guitar hero hacks – get working on that folks.

Posted at 9:21 am on Jul 30th, 2008 by granular_serene

This hand runs off of one motor and the same actions are performed each time, the difference being that the motor speeds up and slows down during each song played at different rates depending upon the song. At first glance, it is an effective illusion but not a very hackable toy. As it stands, you won’t get any independent finger motion out of this thing at all.
Ye are warned.

Posted at 9:55 am on Jul 30th, 2008 by MondoJon

Please don’t get me started! Here’s a brief list of the most recent crap I bought:
- bluetooth bracelets for proximity alert and silent phone ring
- cheap-ass chinese HMD (QVGA)
- wireless color micro video camera with sound
- miscellaneous webcams, USB sticks and laser pointers
- innumerable “pound shop” (uk’s equivalent to 99c stores) gadgets

The only problem is finding the time to transform them in valuable projects!

Posted at 10:14 am on Jul 30th, 2008 by dario

Thing from adams family and sign language rss reader were my first ideas. Then I remembered that my friends run a haunted house, and it’d be a great prop to lose a hand and have it crawl away on it’s own. Seems that you’d only need to either move two fingers or all of them at once.

Posted at 2:13 pm on Jul 30th, 2008 by X

In terms of stuff acquired to play with and perhaps hack into and do something different with, recently I bought a Quickshot Robot Arm which you control using two old-school 9-way D connection joysticks (Spectrum/Amiga/C64 etc.) but I also bought two new old stock PSX pads that I intend to hack up into a single pad with two 8-way controllers in so I can control the arm with just a single hacked joypad. Unfortunately I got stalled because the motor that rotates the whole arm stalls and won’t turn it properly.

One day I want to make a robot arm with miniature servos controlled by a computer which is in turn controlled with a PS2 joypad.

Posted at 6:14 pm on Jul 30th, 2008 by Haku

You would not believe the amount of junk I have in the “to hack” list… But, the thing that stands out the most is a 300-disc Sony CD changer I got for really cheap on the ‘bay. (The phrase “needs work” is music to my ears!)

It seems the drive belt (read: cheap rubber band) had slipped off the carousel. D’oh! I fixed that, but who uses CDs anymore? Hence the reason I got it: I want to hack a DVD (burner, probably) drive in place of the CD one and interface the onboard CD catalogue thingy to some kind of software to keep track of DVDs, install discs, burned backup discs, etc.

The only road-blocks are: 1) finding the time/space, and 2) getting over my fear of completely ruining both a DVD drive and disc changer. :P

Also, who cares about the stupid hand-shaped, Chinese Furby? There are too many cool/useful hacks out there to waste time on that junk…

Posted at 3:56 am on Jul 31st, 2008 by Amos

keyboard input interface:

The hand would receive orders what key should it press (either from another keyboard, from the web, wherever), would move above the desired key and press it.

Posted at 4:21 pm on Sep 1st, 2008 by hajma

$13 for a robot music hand seems like it is a fair price. I guess the real question is what kind of music does it play for the $13?

Posted at 3:19 pm on Jan 31st, 2009 by Rubber Bracelets