Thanks for ruining a good thing, or TRYING to!

open-hardware-logo-vote

It seems that there has been some shenanigans happening with the OSHW logo voting page as some are using scripts to game the system for their favorite design. Why? Who knows...  How? Well one of the advocates of OSHW [Bill Porter] set about figuring that out, and things should be patched up now, though that still leaves 3,122 faulty votes to weed out on the final day (April 5th). While it is … [Read more...]

DIY camera stabilizer keeps your video shake free on the cheap

diy_camera_stabilizer

Commercial vest-based camera stabilizer systems are quite expensive, sometimes bearing price tags in the $700-$800 dollar range. Photographer [Miguel Vicente] has a pretty well-stocked workshop and decided there was no way he would shell out that much cash for a rig, so he simply built his own. "Simply" is a bit of a misstatement, to be honest. The system looks relatively complex, judging by … [Read more...]

R/C car controlled by an iPad or Kinect

ipad_kinect_rc_control

R/C cars can be tons of fun, but sometimes the fun runs out after awhile. [Gaurav] got bored of steering around his R/C car with its remote, so he built an interface that lets him control the car using two different motion-detecting devices. He built an HTML5 application for his iPad, which allows him to steer the car around. As you can see in the video below, the application utilizes the … [Read more...]

Screaming Altoids tin just in time for April Fool’s

altoids_screamer

Maker [Dino Segovis] has started on a project he calls "Hack a week" where he will be putting together one hack or project per week, for a full year. The first installment of his video series was finished just two days before April Fool's, and appropriately enough covers the construction of a circuit you can use to prank your friends. The "Altoids Screamer" is a simple circuit based on a 555 … [Read more...]

Think Geeks wants you to have broken stuff

think-geek-gives-away-its-returns

Think Geek has a growing pile of returns and damaged product that they're trying to get rid of. The purveyors of technological oddities, like any other large retailer, sometimes have stuff that doesn't work right, or has been damaged somewhere between factory and consumer. The broken bits find their way back to the distribution center and now they're stuck with the task of doing something with … [Read more...]

Building an Advanced Mobile Phone Service (AMPS) base station

amps-base-station

Remember the early days of cellphones and carphones when they were super-bulky and all the rage? Those early handsets used analog technology for communications in a protocol called Advanced Mobile Phone Service (AMPS). As more customers flocked to wireless providers, networks were transitioned over to digital phones in order to save bandwidth. Some places still support AMPS but it has rapidly gone … [Read more...]

Solar-powered MP3 playing speaker

solar_speakers

[Valentin] bought a small battery-powered cube speaker with a built-in amp some time ago, but didn't have much patience for replacing or recharging the batteries. It sat on the shelf for awhile until he decided to revive an old MP3 player he had sitting around. He gutted a pair of solar garden lamps, retaining the solar panels, the built-in charging circuits, as well as the included … [Read more...]