Live out your inner animist with animatronic cat ears

While having a great white shark as your spirit animal may sound cool, we’ve found walking around in public wearing a gigantic set of mechanical jaws to be a bit of a hindrance. [abetusk] doesn’t have that problem; he can wear his awesome animatronic cat ears anywhere he pleases.

The build was inspired by these extremely Japanese animatronic ears loaded … Read the rest

Hacking together a color changing water wall

[BadWolf's] girlfriend wanted him to build her a lamp for Christmas and he didn’t disappoint. What he came up with is a water-filled color changing lamp with bubbles for added interest. See for yourself in the clip after the jump.

The color changing properties are easily taken care of by some waterproof RGB LED strips. [BadWolf] went the Arduino route … Read the rest

Data broacasting “Transparency Grenade” ads whimsy to your meetings

If you’re tired of underhanded deals going down behind closed doors maybe you need to start carrying around this transparency grenade. The enclosure is modeled after a Soviet-era F1 Hand Grenade. But it’s not filled with explosives and won’t send deadly shrapnel around the room. Instead, when the pin is pulled it starts recording audio and sniffing network packets, … Read the rest

Hidden bookshelf switch

So you don’t have any secret passageways in your house, but if you’ve got a bookshelf this secret switch can add some fun to your routine. [Brandon] saw a commercially available version which was out of stock when he went to order so he set out to build his own.

He’s using the switch to operate a lamp. The donor … Read the rest

Who couldn’t use a little more screen space?

Text LCD’s are handy for any occasion, a printer port on your PC is also darn handy as well. Mix together and add in a splash of linux and you get a very handy Linux device driver for a 16×2 LCD connected to the parallel port.

Electrically the LCD is wired up in a typical 4 bit mode, this allows … Read the rest

Tired of the Normal Use for Your Toothbrush? Why not an Engraving Tool?

Hardware hackers and makers like us may not be well known for our excellent hygiene habits, but after [Dan]‘s creation, no one can claim he doesn’t know how to use one! Either out of a total disdain for tooth care, or hopefully, after using one properly for many months, [Dan] decided to turn his electric toothbrush into an engraving … Read the rest

Flash an Arduino from an SD card

[Kevin] has been working on reverse engineering the protocol used by the Arduino IDE and porting it to the Arduino platform. Now that his BootDrive project is nearing completion, he’s ready to give every Arduino the ability to program another Arduino over an SD card.

BootDrive isn’t terribly different from using an Arduino as an ISP, only now AVRdude … Read the rest