If you’ve ever found yourself thinking, “I wish I had a laser projector hidden in a zippo”, then you’ll really appreciate this project. [Rog8811], who you might remember from the laser lighter, has made a spirograph style green laser projector that fits inside his zippo. This is very compact and you would have no idea it was there until you open it up. Just be careful, this seems perfect for causing eye damage to someone who isn’t expecting a laser to shoot out of your zippo.
We’ve all seen a million digital picture frames. Usually, people use an old outdated laptop or something. [Quinten] just sent in this one he made using an Eeepc 701. Being the first one available, the smallest both in terms of screen size and storage, they are available pretty cheap. There’s nothing amazingly groundbreaking here, just yanking all the parts out of the Eeepc and mounting them, nicely, in a wooden frame. [Quinten] did a great job getting everything in, with the least amount of space wasted. It strikes us that He has made a super cheap tablet conversion, he’s only missing the touch screen. We’ve seen Eeepctablet conversions, but they seemed to have much more difficult to construct cases.
[Pocket_Lucho] has really done a fantastic job on this one. He’s making miniature arcade cabinets(translated) from old consoles. This post is mainly talking about a Sega genisis version, but he’s also done one for the PC engine(aka turbografix 16). He takes us through pulling RGB video strait from the chip as well as harvesting buttons from a cheapo all in one arcade controller. For the screen he’s using a PSone portable LCD, pretty much un modified. What really stands out is the final layout. He has built tiny arcade cabinets, about a foot tall, to house them. These are amazingly awesome and we want one. No, we want an entire mini arcade of them. You can see a video after the break.
[Marcus] saw [Alex]‘s 64 pixel project and decided it could be implemented in even less space. Pictured above is his Space Invader button with a bicolor LED matrix. The controller board is all SMD and piggybacked on the matrix. An ATmega164P drives the 24 pins via transistors. In addition to animation, the board can do LED sensing too. It’s a very clever project and [Marcus] has some notes about working with such tiny components. You can see a video of it below. Read the rest of this entry »
[tioguerra] helped make these tiny bots for the World Robocup 2008 in china. There’s tons of information on the Mixed Reality forum, but you might be specifically interested in the bot section. There are breakdowns of different aspects, such as charging and IR communication, as well as some great photographs of the unit along with a smaller one. The construction of the robot seems so nicely fit together, someone spent a lot of time getting the design just right. Since we don’t see a new section for 2009 bots, we are guessing that they’ll use this design again.
This looks like someone watched the Obsolete Technology Band, and had to have one of their own. It appears to be a dock, driving several different sizes of old hard drives. While the concept isn’t new, we thought they did a decent job of putting the whole display together. It could be fun to have that mounted on our wall, waiting for geek friends to impress.
[epokh] sent in this cool project where he wrote some custom code to control the Spykee robot using gestures. He filters out everything but green through his web cam, then wraps his fingers in green tape. He then runs a series of filters to clean it up a little bit. The resulting “blobs” are tracked and converted to motor commands. You can see the setup in action in the video after the break. This guy might look familiar, as we posted a super quick head tracking rig he did with legos recently. Some of you mentioned, in the comments, that the legos were a waste, you’ll find that he thought so too, and ended up fabbing a simple rig to take the place of the legos.
[Steve] is in the MFA Design and Technology program at parsons, and as part of his studies, has built a couple really interesting projects. First, the Beat boxxx, as seen in the video above, is an 80′s retro looking portable beat looper. You create and loop your beats at the time of playing using simple hand gestures. The look is great, for those who enjoy cardboard and magic marker, though we think some tonal variation and possibly a wider pitch variation would really make this fun.
His second project is Speak to Me/Breathe. This project was meant to be a commentary on security in our daily information. He is visually displaying the braille symbols to spell out his emails. If any person were to spend the effort, they could decipher his emails. The finish on this project is quite nice, you can see a video of the display after the break.
