Fresh hacks every day
[HammyDude] was tired of buying replacement batteries for his power tools. He had some Lithium Polymer batteries on hand and decided to take one of his dead drills and swap out the dead power pack. The orange battery pack you see above has a deans connector on it for use with RC vehicles. By opening up the drill housing, [HammyDude] was able to add the mating deans connector. Now the … [Read more...]
Most of the time, CNC machines are used for very precise and exacting. There is another way that allows for a more "hands on" approach to routers and mills that allows for a lot more creativity and freedom. The touchCNC these guys whipped up allows anyone to finger paint with a friggin router. From the forum post the guys sent in, they wrote a simple Android app for a tablet that allows for … [Read more...]
[Todd Harrison] took a slew of pictures in his quest to loose all the secrets of the G-35 Christmas Lights. These are a string of 50 plastic bulbs which house individually addressable RGB LEDs. We've seen a ton of projects that use them, starting about a year ago with the original reverse engineering and most recently used to make a 7x7 LED matrix. But most of the time the original control board … [Read more...]
[Dmitry Grinberg] has to walk all the way across his bedroom to switch the lamp on and off. The drudgery of this finally became too much, so he built a remote control and added dimming for good measure. Above you can see the circuitry for the remote and the receiver, as well as the finished remote housed in what he calls a 'Chinese Altoids tin'. After the break you'll find [Dmitry's] demo … [Read more...]
A few years ago when [Dr. West] was wrapping up his collegiate studies, he put together a pretty cool coilgun for his senior project. The gun was built to simulate the Scorched Earth computer game in real life, but due to time constraints he was only able to build one turret instead of two. The turret was constructed using mainly salvaged components, most of which came from old laser printers … [Read more...]
[Nicholas] wanted to add some flair to his RC car. In addition to the headlights that you see above, there's brake lights, and a horn that plays "Dixie" like the General Lee in the Dukes of Hazard. All of this is triggered by the wireless controller, but he figured out a way to monitor the servo signals in order to add the additional features. The hack is driven by a Propeller chip. [Nicholas] … [Read more...]
Trade shows are all about attracting attention and getting people to learn about your product, so what could be better than a custom-built RC blimp? Sure, you could just buy one, but what's the fun in that? After several design iterations, [Tretton37] came up with a blimp known as the [LeetZeppelin] controlled by an Arduino, an XBee module, as well as a Wiimote controller connected to a … [Read more...]
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