To decorate the office for Halloween [Eric] decided to make [Vigo the Carpathian] stare at passersby. We hope that readers recognize this image, but for those younger hackers who don’t, this painting of [Vigo] played an important part in the classic film Ghostbusters II.

In the movie, his eyes appeared to be following anyone looking at the painting. [Eric] grabbed a Kinect and used Processing to recreate the effect in real life. The image is displayed on an LCD screen. A bit of work with Photoshop allowed him to cut out the eyes from the image, then create sprites which are moved by the Processing sketch. It’s reading data from the Kinect (so it knows where to ‘look’) which you can see perched on the top of the cubicle wall. The illusion is delightful, see for yourself in the clip after the break. We’ve already watched it a half-dozen times, and it looks like it was a real hit with the guests at the open house.

Can you believe they threw this together in just one day?

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If you have ever traveled around Europe, you are likely familiar with parking discs. Required in many countries that would rather not deal with parking meters, these devices are placed in the front of a car’s window, and indicate when the vehicle was parked. When parking enforcement officers come through the area, it makes quick work of identifying which cars need to be ticketed.

[Michael] received a fancy electronic parking disc as a gift, but the device was incredibly buggy, causing him all sorts of grief. After contacting the manufacturer and receiving no helpful response, he took it upon himself to get things working properly.

He dismantled the disc and found that like many products today, the microprocessors were locked down behind a layer of hard resin. Undeterred, he decided to rebuild it from the ground up using an ATmega microcontroller to provide basic parking disc functionality. He also armed his disc with a GSM modem and a GPS receiver – the former gives him the ability to communicate with the device, while the latter provides accurate time data while allowing him to keep tabs on the car’s location, should the need arise.

The hacked disc’s guts reside in his glove box, and can be controlled using his iPhone, making it easy to tweak his parking time at will.

Check out the video below to see his parking clock in action, and if you have questions on any part of the build, [Michael] says he’s more than happy to fill in any missing details.

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[Thomas’] love affair with Commodore computers spans well over 30 years, and not too long ago he decided to recreate one of his favorite Commodore offerings, the PET. As we have seen with similar undertakings, this sort of project is no easy task, but [Thomas] seems to be making his way along nicely.

Using a Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA on the Digilent Nexys3 dev board, he has implemented the Pet in Verilog. Like the original, his clone contains 16K of both ROM and RAM, utilizing the same simulated 6502 microprocessor he used on a previous Apple ][+ project. The FPGA version of the computer sports a 640x400 resolution which is twice that of the original, so [Thomas] simply doubled the size of each of the PET’s pixels to fill in the extra space.

[Thomas] has made some great progress so far, including the ability to load games and other programs from cassette images over a serial connection. He says that there are still a few loose ends to tie up, but it all looks good from here!

Continue reading to see a short video of Space Invaders running on he PET recreation.

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For those of you not familiar, an induction heater is a device capable of heating something up very rapidly using a changing magnetic field. [RMC Cybernetics] decided to build one and was nice enough to write up the project for the Internet’s learning and amusement. A full explanation as well as a schematic and build instructions are provided on their website.

This heater works using a principle involved in most transformers. When there is a change in the magnetic field near a conductive object, a current will be induced in it and it will generate heat. Interestingly enough, while transformers are designed to minimize this heat, an induction heater instead aims to maximize this heat in whatever object is placed within the coils.

[RMC] Has provided a video of how to build the heater as well as it in action after the break! Skip to to 1:42 to see the heating in action. Or watch the whole thing to see how it’s built.

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Why not that is, if you have a prosthetic arm. Although it’s hard to believe we haven’t seen this before, [Trevor Prideaux], according to [The Telegraph's] article, “has become the world’s first ever patient to have a smartphone docking system built into his prosthetic arm.”

[Trevor] was born without a forearm, and, as he puts it, he’s used to adapting to things.  However, he thought others might be struggling with the same problem, especially those that become disabled later in life. Once their help was secured, Nokia and the Exeter Mobility Centre got to work on his new limb and produced a prototype in five weeks!

[Trevor] is quite pleased with his new phone docking system. Texting especially is much easier and safer, and the phone can be removed when needed for making calls. We love to see hacks like this where people enhance their abilities using technology! For another hack helping those with disabilities, check out this wheelchair elevator/winch made for a non-accessible apartment.

via [reghardware.com]

This week we continue on with another video in our series about how to program for the ATmega328p processor using C. The ATmega328p is at the heart of many Arduino boards. If you have been using them but want to add some more horsepower to your projects, this series of videos is for you. In this video, [Jack] talks about various types of pulse width modulation (PWM). You can use PWM to control the speed of a motor, the brightness of a LED, or to generate analog waveforms. [Jack] shows how to set up the processor to do locked anti-phase PWM to drive the wheels of the 3pi robot and then demos a short program that shows the code in action.

If you missed the previous posts in this series and would like to check them out…
Intro and how to set up the development environment : Click Here
Working with I/O pins: Click Here

Video is after the break…
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We know it’s shopped, but we can’t tell because of the pixels. PhD student [Kevin Karsch] along with a few other friends will be presenting their methods to render objects into preexisting photos at SIGGRAPH Asia next month.

The paper (PDF…) covers how [Kevin] et al. go about putting impossible objects into photos. The user first defines the geometry of the picture; legs of tables are defined and the table top is extruded from these legs. The lights are then defined by drawing a bounding box and with a little bit of algorithmic trickery, a 3D object is inserted into the scene.

Comparing the results to the original picture is jaw-dropping. For us, photoshopping a bunch of billiard balls on a pool table would take hours, and it would never look quite right. [Kevin]‘s work for SIGGRAPH can do the whole scene in minutes and produces results we couldn’t dream of.

There’s no downloadable software yet, but the algorithms are there. Check out the video demo of the techniques and results after the break.

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If you haven’t taken the time to put your decorations together it’s time to get a move on. With Halloween just around the corner big elaborate displays are pretty much out of the question, but [Boris] and the team over at Open Electronics have a simple project that’s sure to be a hit with the Trick or Treaters.

Using a cheap plastic prop that you can likely find at any Halloween store, they have put together a simple talking skull that moves along with whatever music or sound is being piped through it. The skull’s mouth is moved by a single servo mounted inside the brain cavity, which is controlled by an Arduino. The Arduino monitors the sound level of the source audio being played, actuating the servo accordingly.

It’s quick, simple, and effective – perfect for a last minute decorating project. If you are a little more ambitious, you could always put together a whole chorus of skulls without too much additional effort – just a few extra skulls and some servos would do the trick nicely.

Check out a quick video of the skull in action below, along with another short clip showing how the servo is rigged up to move its mouth.

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