Making wheelchairs more safe through high visibility

lights_and_sounds_wheelchair

When traveling around the city or even rural areas in a wheelchair, we imagine it can be pretty easy to get overlooked. [Rui] was asked to add some lights and sounds to an electric wheelchair in order to ensure that its rider remained visible to those around him. The system uses several different components to ensure that the driver can be seen. The first is a message board strapped to the back … [Read more...]

Use FPGAs the easy way with Alien Cortex AV

alien_cortex_av_fpga_board

Hackaday reader [Louis] wrote in to call our attention to a neat project over at Kickstarter that he thought would interest his fellow readers. The AlienCortex AV is a pre-built FPGA board from [Bryan Pape] with gobs of ports and a ton of potential. At the heart of the board is an Xilinx PQ208 Spartan 3e 500k FPGA, which can be configured to perform any number of functions. The board sports a … [Read more...]

10,000 year clock sounds like an Indiana Jones flick – makes us wonder if we’re being trolled

10000-year-clock

So you hear that someone is building a clock that will run for 10,000 years and you think 'oh, that's neat'. Then you start looking into it and realize that it's being built on a mountain-sized scale in a remote part of the US and things start to get a bit strange. As much as it might sound like a Sci-Fi novel (or some creative trolling), the Long Now Foundation is in the process of building and … [Read more...]

Repaired microwave keypad looks as good as new

microwave_keypad_repair

Instructables user [Rohit] had an out-of-warranty microwave with a broken membrane keypad. Much like our friend [Alexandre] from Brazil, he found the cost of replacement parts beyond reasonable, so he had to find a way to repair it instead. He disassembled the front cover of his microwave to get at the main controller board. Once it was detached, he removed the keypad’s cover to get a closer … [Read more...]

3 Axis Plotter Made from Spare Parts

3d plotter from parts

The plotter featured above was, according to the author, made almost entirely of salvaged parts. In addition to what he had accumulated, only $20 in parts was needed to complete this build. Pretty good considering the thousands of dollars that a new plotter goes for. Control of all axes is accomplished using unipolar stepper motors.  In this case only one unipolar motor was available along … [Read more...]

Tiny Morse code trainer

morse

[Eric] wanted to teach his kids Morse code, so he built a tiny Morse code trainer. [Eric] built the trainer around an ATtiny85, and the rest of the circuit follows this minimalist idea. After connecting a piezo beeper and 6-pin ISP header, the only thing left to do was write a little code and start teaching his kids Morse. The Morse trainer is programmed to repeat the message, "SOS the moon … [Read more...]

Synapse turns your Kinect into a Dubstep theremin

kinect_dubstep_theremin

[Ryan Challinor] is part of a group constructing a display for this year’s Burning Man festival that includes the Kinect, Ableton Live, and Quartz Composer. As the programming guru of the project, he was tasked with creating a method for his partners to utilize all three products via an easy to use interface. His application is called Synapse and was inspired by videos he saw online of people … [Read more...]