We recently had the pleasure of visiting the LVL1  hackerspace in Louisville, Kentucky. Any hackers in the Louisville area who haven’t visited yet are doing themselves a big disservice.  The space recently had its one year anniversary in July, but it’s hard to tell. The space features many of the things you’d only expect in older spaces such as a laser cutter (added while we were visiting), CNC machines, extensive electronics workbenches, and even a section for those who are into music. The best part about the LVL1 hackerspace is it’s members. We’ve all heard horror stories of hacker spaces with drama or overly restricting rules, but the people at LVL1 are extremely friendly and willing to help.

The Micro Colonel (president, if you wanna go that route), [Christopher Cprek], gave us a tour of the space and its current projects. One of the most impressive is the White Star Balloon project, which aims to fly a balloon across the Atlantic. There’s also the Louisville Soundbuilders which meet at the space every other Monday at 8pm to make new instruments. Some other projects include a telepresence robot, a pony that breaths fire, and a power wheels race car for the Detroit Makerfaire. There are also things such as the Kentucky Open Source Society (KYOSS) that meets at the space. Even a few sumobots were scattered around. We were fortunate that at the same time we were visiting [Brandon Gunn], who regularly does video tours of the hackerspaces he visits, was there too; watch his video tour of the space after the break.

The space usually has an open to the public meeting every tuesday at 7:00, but be sure to check out their calendar for more.  If you’ve never been to a hackerspace before you should definitely make an effort. It’s not the tools that make a space, but the people, and LVL1 delivers.

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Made by Boston Dynamics under contract from Sandia Labs, this “hopper” is quite incredible as you can see in the video after the break. Boston Dynamics is no stranger to great robotics designs, including the well known “Big Dog” four-legged robot. This robot, although possibly less advanced, has a very unique trick up it’s sleve.

This robot’s distinguishing feature is that it can navigate autonomously not only with wheels, but also with a powerful single leg that allows it to jump over obstacles of up to 25 feet. Although envisioned to “deliver a payload” in an urban environment, one could imagine a terrifying  horde of these ‘bots jumping into action armed with bombs or other weapons.

According to Sandia’s website is that this form of locomotion has been “shown to be five times more efficient than hovering” when trying to get around obstacles under 10 meters. Technical challenges that have been overcome include managing the shock of landing and producing a leg powerful enough to jump to this height. Read the rest of this entry »

If you happen to be in the market for some designer dice or need a set of custom dice for a game you have created, you could pay a ton of money to have them made, or you can do it yourself.

[Dicecreator] runs a blog dedicated to the ins and outs of creating DIY game and collector’s dice. This subject is not something that we would normally be interested in, but one particular item caught our interest – DIY toner transfer dice. Very similar to the process of creating a toner transfer PCB, he walks through the steps required for making your own dice with very little overhead.

The steps are likely quite familiar to those who have fabricated your own PCBs at home. He starts out with blank dice, sanding the sides down with increasingly fine sandpaper until they are ready for the transfer process. An image is printed on glossy inkjet photo paper, which is then applied to each die with a standard clothes iron. After a bit of soaking in water to remove the excess paper, the die is ready to go.

Sure it’s not exactly rocket science, but it is a cool little trick that would work quite well if you are trying to replace a lost die or if you simply want to make a fun gift for a friend.

Someone sent in a tip that pointed us to this Magic: The Gathering forum thread where a user named [DistortedDesigns] made a life counter for Magic: The Gathering out of Nixie tubes. While there’s not many details for this build, it’s just too cool to be forgotten in a single forum.

The project began by etching some plexiglas. There’s some earlier examples of [DistortedDesigns]‘ work that look very professional. The electronic are extremely simple – the 25 LEDs run off of 2 AA cells, and the nixies run off of 2 C cells. We were wondering when [DistortedDesigns] would drop the A-bomb, but it looks like this build doesn’t use a microcontroller.

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[Webby] inherited a cordless drill from his dad and when he finally got around to using it, found that the charger was dead in the water. He disassembled it and narrowed the issue down to the charger’s primary transformer, but didn’t know where to go from there. A friend suggested that the coil’s thermal fuse might have blown, and upon further investigation, [Webby] discovered that his friend was right.

He removed the dead fuse and soldered in a piece of wire just for testing – not surprisingly the charger sprang to life. He picked up a new thermal fuse to replace the old one, but he wasn’t quite satisfied with the fix just yet. If the fuse burned out once already, there’s little to stop it from happening again, so he decided that installing a small cooling fan would be a good idea. He mounted the fan on the outside of the case after cutting some vent holes, leeching power from the charger itself.

While simply adding a fan to the charger might not be everyone’s idea of a perfect solution, it has worked out quite well for [Webby] in the past, so if it isn’t broken…

[via HackedGadgets]

We’ve been hiding away in air-conditioned comfort to wait out the hot weather afflicting most of the US right now. Luckily we’re keeping busy with the great links coming into our tips box.

[Brett] sent us a note about his work on the new Arduino PID library. He is the author of the original library and recently decided it was time for a ground-up rewrite. But along the way he took the time to explain PID control and the choices he made during development.

We see a lot of PID controllers around here, like this router based espresso machine add-on. Proportional-Integral-Derivative Controllers are a way to make sure the control you intended to get from your devices is actually achieved in practice. They monitor a process and accumulate results over time in order to account for future events. From what we’ve just described you can see why the subject needs to be demystified.

Get yourself elbow-deep into [Brett's] article. He does a great job of discussing each issue, and uses a multitude of easily understandable graphs to show the hurdles each portion of code is meant to overcome.

So your electronic hobby skills are coming along quite nicely but you’re not very comfortable doing more than blinking a few LEDs. Now’s a good time to try something new by driving a couple of DC motors.

You probably know that you can’t just hook these up to the pins of your favorite uC and call it good. The motors draw a lot of current (especially if they’re strained in lifting a heavy load) which would burn out your logic circuitry. Add to this the excess induced current that is generated when a spinning motor is shut off and you’re going to need a control system that can handle these dangers.

Enter the h-bridge motor driver. [Chris] has guided us through the process of building and using a H-bridge in the past. This time he’s using a motor controller that has four half H-bridges built into it. He hooks up the SN754410 to two motors, giving him speed and direction control for both based on the duty cycle of a PWM signal entering the chip for less than $2.50. Check out the video after the break for an overview of his methodology, then work your way through the multi-page post that he recently published.

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[Brendan Robert] has been sending us forum thread links outlining the things he’s learned while hacking LG televisions. They were a bit hard to follow for the uninitiated, so we asked if he could give us an overview of what he’s been working on. Not only did he do that, but he made a little Hackaday shout-out seen above by adding the skull and cross-wrenches as one of the menu overlays.

He’s using a TV as his computer monitor, which he picked up at a discount because it was a display model. Without the original remote, and wanting to have features like power-saving mode which is standard on monitors but not on this TV, he decided to see what he could accomplish. A couple of things made this quite a bit easier. First, there’s an RS232 port built into the back which removes the need to investigate and solder your own onto the board. Secondly, since LG built on the Linux kernel for the set, you can download some of the firmware sources from their website.

What he came up with is a script that will find and communicate with the TV over the serial connection. The test script used during development polled every possible command, looking for valid return values. Once [Brendan] established which commands work and what they do, he was able to take command of the unit, writing scripts to adjust brightness based on the ambient light in the room as seen from the computer’s webcam. Make sure you check out the sub-pages to his post that detail the brightness adjustments, stand-by functionality, custom overlay graphics, and the extra commands he uncovered.