Under-desk RGB keyboard lighting

under-desk-keyboard-light

[Jay Collett] was having trouble seeing his keyboard when the room was dim. But throwing a light under the desk just didn't seem cool enough. Instead he built an RGB light board that is controlled by his desktop. The board is based around an ATmega328 with the Arduino booloader. He etched a single-sided PCB to connect it to a group of five RGB LEDs, with a programming header for an FTDI cable. The … [Read more...]

DIY vaporizer

diy-vaporizer

Here's a DIY vaporizer build. It uses a 30 watt Radio Shack soldering iron as a heat source that is regulated with a common dimmer switch. This is done by removing the soldering tip and replacing it with threaded rod attached to a brass pipe fitting assembly. This is housed inside of a Mason jar with a copper pipe for air intake and another for output. Not surprisingly the creator tipped us off … [Read more...]

Gum ball maze updated… now with robots!

marble-maze-with-robots

In what is surely becoming an ever-growing Rube Goldberg machine, [Dan] updated his gum ball dispenser to include a robot arm. We looked in on this human lab-rat experiment that rewards successful maze navigation with bubble-gum just about a year ago. As you can seen in the video after the break he's added several new features to delight users. The original had a maze actuated by an accelerometer … [Read more...]

Dungeon crawler game for IM-ME (and Linux)

dungeon-crawler-for-IM-ME

[Joby Taffey] takes the prize for the first completed homebrew game for the IM-ME. Over the last few weeks we've seen [Travis Goodspeed] working with sprite graphics, and [Emmanuel Roussel] developing game music for the pink pager. But [Joby] didn't really use either of those. [Travis'] sprites were using a framebuffer that fills up a lot of valuable RAM. [Joby] decided to draw the room … [Read more...]

Moving a resistor for EvalBot power when programming

evalbot-power-from-debugger

[Riley Porter] posted a picture of his EvalBot USB power hack. In the photo above we've put a box around D6 and D7. The development board ships with a 0 Ohm resistor in the D7 location, patching in power from the USB-B connector labeled USB DEVICE. He found that by moving that resistor to D6 he can power the board from the USB-B connector labeled ICDI. That connector is the In-Circuit Debug … [Read more...]

Open Source Kinect contest has been won

libfreeneck-verify

Adafruit Technologies has announced the winner of the Open Source Kinect contest. [Hector], who we mentioned yesterday has won, providing both RGB and depth access to the device.  Some of you were asking at that time, why the contest was not over yet. Well, Adafruit had to verify. The image you see above are of another user[qdot], verifying the drivers on his machine. What is interesting is … [Read more...]

Japanese Micro Planes

indoapueen

Some very well engineered micro planes(translated) have been buzzing around the net. The goal here is ultra light weight. These suped-up paper planes have a remarkable target weight of around 10 grams (translated). The lighter the micro plane is the slower and more maneuverable it will be leading to some pretty interesting and scary applications. For controls it looks like many of the planes … [Read more...]