Month: April 2009

Radio Controlled Nerf Tank

April 23, 2009 by 11 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FjT9nUkj-I]

[Travis7s] has built this giant Nerf Tank. Featuring Radio controls, a web cam, laser sights, and the ability to play music, this thing is pretty awesome.  He’s using the Nerf Vulcan rifle, temporarily modified with a servo for remote firing. This thing is pretty huge, as you can see from the video, it sits about as high as the seat cushions of the chairs in his house. The sound system is an amplifier and some speakers hooked up to an iPod. This thing could use a nice coat of paint to make it a little more menacing and a little less Nerf. What it really needs though, is the ability to play sounds from a sound board. Imagine the Imperial March as it enters a room, or maybe a sound board with appropriate insults and phrases for the onslaught.

A New Contender In Home Fabbing

April 23, 2009 by 30 Comments

purple_crayon

Purple Crayon is a new entry into the home fabricating arena.  Shown above, with it’s makers [Konrad] and [Aaron], it’s set to compete with RepRap and Cupcake. It looks to be bigger than Cupcake, but smaller than the reprap. There aren’t many details available on their site, but we’re sure there will be soon. They do state that it should retail for less than $1,000.

Autonomous Tank Terrorizing Campus

April 23, 2009 by 18 Comments

tank

As a senior design project for ECE4007,  [Nate], [An], [Chris], and [Wink] built an autonomous toy tank. It is using a Panasonic IR motion sensor to find targets, then once it’s facing the target it switches to visual motion tracking through it’s web cam. If it can get close enough, it will stop and begin rotating the turret for more accuracy. Finally it fires a pellet. It’s brains are an ICOP technology eBox-2300 running windows CE. All of the programming is available on the site, as well as a breakdown of the various sensors and hardware. As you can see in the video after the break, it does a decent job. Given some more time, we’re sure they could speed up the target acquisition process. Maybe we should add a category for Georgia Tech final projects.

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TUIO Multitouch On IPhone Via Browser Hack

April 22, 2009 by 11 Comments

[vimeo=3975324]

When the MSAFluids Remote multitouch App was rejected, a developer found a way to get virtually the same effect using a safari App. They’re using the TUIO protocol to get the desired remote control. This opens up the door to extending Applications through the browser as well. While this probably wouldn’t allow you to utilize the other sensor inputs from your device, like accelerometer data, it will allow for fast prototyping of applications that don’t need that.

Going Green, By Not Buying New Stuff

April 22, 2009 by 29 Comments

lym

Recycling is great. We’ve seen a pretty hard push in that direction recently. We like the fact that our modifying of hardware is generally saving it from the dump. Keep in mind, that just using old hardware can be advantageous too. We don’t always need the new shiny thing, maybe we’re fine with what we’ve got. That is exactly what lastyearsmodel.org is about. You can join their facebook group and even get stickers for your old devices.

Condenser Microphone Building

April 22, 2009 by 28 Comments

mic

Browsing around today, this project caught our eye. Mainly due to the visual similarity to, well, personal massagers. As it turns out, it’s a home made studio condenser microphone. We would generally prefer to link directly to his personal page, that has a slightly more in dept write up, but it has popups and pop unders, so enter at your own risk.  Generally condenser mics require phantom power to make the magic happen, but he has included a circuit to run them off of 9v batteries. We’ve done condenser mics before, but this seems a bit quicker and dirtier.