Home Built Revolving Shotgun

Shotgun-2-MeCropped

Sometimes, you just need more ammo available. In this weapon mod, the chamber of a 12 gauge shotgun, a hammer from an 1857 Remington Perc Revolver, and other parts from an Italian auto shotgun were all combined to make this happen. The gun is of questionable legality depending on what state or country it resides in. Don't quote us on it, but the members of the forum seem to think it should be fine … [Read more...]

Chroma – Mesmerizing LED driven fractal display

chroma in action

A big fan of generative art, [Andrew Magill] wanted to build an LED display for his wall that constantly displayed images from the Electric Sheep project.  After discounting the possibility of generating these fractals on the fly, he settled on using prerecorded video clips gathered over a year's time by Electric Sheep users.  With thousands of video clips in hand, he wrote some custom software … [Read more...]

Fowl accommodations provided by mathematics

geodesic-chicken-coup

[Anthony's] chickens happily return to roost each night thanks to the spacious house he built for them. Sadly the geodesic dome never became the home of the future despite what the people were promised. But using a bit of unorthodox joinery you can create enclosures for your chickens or other animals in need of shelter. The construction begins with 30 isosceles triangles and nine equilateral … [Read more...]

Laptop LCD reused in Beagleboard project

adding-lcd-driver-to-beagleboard

This daughterboard lets [Matt Evans] drive a laptop LCD using a Beagleboard. Apparently the Beagleboard gained a VGA header when it moved to revision C but [Matt's] working with revision B4 which is why he had to do all of that ninja soldering with the blue wires. The driver board itself is a thing of beauty, hosting a DS90C363 LVDS serialiser as well as some buffer chips that handle level … [Read more...]

A Charlieplex display and a board layout tip

charlieplex-conways-game-of-life

[Ben] is getting himself up to speed with microcontrollers. He jumped into the deep end by taking on this Charlieplex LED matrix build. As you can see after the break, he not only made the display work, but coded Conway's game of life to run on the ATtiny85 that drives the device. What you see above is the prototype version that [Ben] used to make sure he had the hardware just right. He's seeing … [Read more...]

Sniffing RF hardware communication packets

sniffing-radio-communications

[Travis Goodspeed] put together a proof of concept hack that sniffs wireless keyboard data packets. He's using the Next HOPE badge that he designed as the hardware platform for these tests. It has an nRF24L01+ radio on-board which can easily communicate with 2.4 GHz devices. The real trick comes in getting that radio to listen for all traffic, then to narrow that traffic down to just the … [Read more...]

Hamster Powered Strandbeest

hamster_strandbeest

Gakken magazine featured a miniature wind-powered Strandbeest recently, converting it to run on everything from rubber bands to solar power. [Crabfu] thought it would be worthwhile to hack the Strandbeest kit that shipped with the magazine as well, so he started to brainstorm.  Well-known for his steam powered hacks previously featured here, he did originally consider adding a steam plant to the … [Read more...]