Octocopter will someday kill someone

octocopter

Above you can see Doctor Wily a Chinese hacker starting up one of the propellers on his octocopter. It seems that the man is using a collection of eight motorcycle engines, each with its own wooden propeller to create an eight-bladed helicopter. We were able to locate some video footage of his experiments, which you'll find embedded after the break. As you can see, this is perfectly capable of … [Read more...]

USB stick Propeller development board

usb-propeller-development-board

[Parker Dillmann] is nearing the end of the prototyping process for his Propeller development board. He wanted a tool that let him work on projects without the need for a bunch of equipment, while still maintaining the ability to extend the hardware when necessary. His last dev board used a large piece of protoboard to host through hole components including the Propeller chip, 3.3V and 5V … [Read more...]

Add some LED enhancement to your netbook lid

blinken-lights-netbook-lid

[Mathieu] needed to open up his Acer Aspire One to do a hard drive replacement and decided to add a bit of pizzazz while he was in there. The image above is the lid of the netbook adorned with RGB LEDs and a spray painted stencil. He previously purchased a set of surface mount RGB packages on eBay and thought that they were perfect for this hack. after removing the case he found that by using … [Read more...]

Flip off your alarm clock!

flipclock

[Corbin] hates fumbling around in the dark with his alarm blaring, looking for the off switch. He was so annoyed with regular alarm clocks that he decided to build his own simpler timepiece. The FlipClock resides in a simple black plastic case lacking any buttons whatsoever. When the alarm goes off, all one needs to do is flip the clock over to disable it. The digits automatically right … [Read more...]

Interfacing with a PS/2 Keyboard

ps2_complete_small

Anyone reading this post has undoubtedly used a keyboard. How they work, however, is a bit more complicated than "one button, one input."  [PyroElectro] has a great tutorial about building a PS/2 keyboard interface with a 7-segment LED display (video after the break). The tutorial also includes quite a bit of theory behind it. The system displayed below uses a PIC controller to display the … [Read more...]

ATtiny Hacks: Infrared guidance and navigation

ir

After [trandi] got his hands on a cheap R/C helicopter he realized the difficulties in actually flying a remote control helicopter. Instead of giving up, he decided to reverse-engineer the infrared protocol and then build a decoder around an ATtiny that would send commands to another microcontroller using a serial connection. The remote's communications protocol was decoded with the help of a … [Read more...]

Large scale Tetris game controlled with DDR pads

led_tetris_using_ddr_pads

Even though Tetris came to the US 25 long years ago, it never fails to entertain. Whatever it is that gives the game such lasting power is a mystery to us, but we’re always interested in seeing fresh takes on the classic game. MIT students [Leah Alpert] and [Russell Cohen] tweaked Tetris a bit to get players off the couch and literally thinking on their feet. The game boards were constructed … [Read more...]