Improvised metal lathe

[McKGyver] needed a few parts manufactured. Instead of going the normal route – finding friends with machine tools or paying a machine shop, he improvised a rudimentary metal lathe.

As much as we love 3D printers, they’re not the be-all, end-all solution for everything. Sometimes, you need to get a little dirty and do it the old-fashioned way. … Read the rest

SNES gamepad coversion to USB

[Kekszumquadrat] wanted to use a classic controller to play emulator games on his Android tablet so he set out to convert an SNES gamepad to connect via USB. He found an old USB keyboard at a yard sale for about 3 Euros. He knew that the emulator he prefers has the option of remapping all the inputs to keyboard keys … Read the rest

Arduino heart rate monitor

[Wolf] had a Polar brand exercise watch that wirelessly monitored a chest strap that sends it heart rate data. It sounds like there’s some way to transfer data from the watch to a computer, but it’s only meant for use with Polar’s website. He wanted to do a little more with the equipment so he ditched the watch and built Read the rest

Working with the µOLED-128-G1 display

If you’re not already familiar with the 4D Systems µOLED-128-G1 display, [Gary] put together a project that shows some of the features it offers. This is a smart display, having its own onboard microcontroller and a microSD slot. The SD card stores image and video data, while the microcontroller takes care of displaying them based on simple serial commands … Read the rest

Discrete logic driving game development

[Caleb] is hard at work on a driving game based on 7400 series logic chips. This will be his entry in the Open 7400 Logic Competition, and it really outlines why this contest is especially tricky.

The concept behind the game is quite simple. You’re the driver of a car (the red dot at the bottom of the … Read the rest

ATtiny Hacks: Stopwatch Turned Race Clock

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The folks over at blondihacks are gearing up for an event called “The 24 Hours Of LeMons” which is a form of low-budget endurance racing involving cheap cars, heroic repairs, wacky themes, and a lot of serious driving. The format of the race is pretty simple, the cars race around the track continuously for a set amount of time (usually … Read the rest

ATtiny Hacks: ATtiny45/85 servo library

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Servo8bit is a library for AVR microcontrollers that allows you to drive servo motors without the need for a 16-bit timer. Obviously, this is quite useful for smaller chips that only have 8-bit timers and it is specifically targeted at the ATtiny45 and ATtiny85 microcontrollers. The library offers 256 steps of resolution, and can drive up to five servos at … Read the rest