Fresh hacks every day
It's Friday night and these guys are driving around town looking for a good spot to play a head-to-head game of Snake. It's not that they need somewhere to sit (they travel with a couch and floor lamp for that purpose) it's that they're using a projector and camera to make a game out of their surroundings. A white Mystery-Machine-style van has room for everything they need to make the traveling … [Read more...]
[Fernando] wrote in to share his take on building a logic analyzer. He's using the parallel port to capture data and feed it to the display software of your choice. The method depends on a custom kernel which alters the way the parallel port works. The kernel he compiled includes a method of intercepting the signals coming in from the hardware, passing that data to the /dev/parport* as it … [Read more...]
Want to monitor the company system without continually loading up the Splunk dashboard? It turns out that they've got their own Python package which makes pulling down data a snap. All [Rick] needed to do was hook up an LED meter as an external display. It used to be that this would take a lot of wire and bit of soldering (or some special Christmas lights), but the advent of affordable LED … [Read more...]
If you've run out of I/O pins on a project and need a way to add user input you can find a slew of port expanders that work with various communications protocols like I2C and 1-Wire. But if you just want to add in some buttons without reaching for an extra IC you'll love this hack. [John Boxall] shows how to add four buttons using one ADC pin. The concept is nothing new. The buttons make up an … [Read more...]
CircuitLab is an electronics simulator which you can run in a browser. Above you can see one of the example circuits provided to help show the power of the application. You can build your schematic (perhaps you want to try [Jeri's] psu shut-off timer?) in the editor mode, then switch over to the simulator to get data back from the components. In that mode, your cursor becomes a probe, and clicking … [Read more...]
[Valentin] wanted to experiment with 3D scanning some objects he had around the house, but says he didn’t want to buy a line laser for the project since they are pretty expensive. Fortunately, he had some random components sitting in his parts bin, and he was able to build his own line laser without spending a ton of money. His tutorial actually covers two different methods of building line … [Read more...]
The more we think about this one the more we like it. [Michael] built himself a wind-powered persistence-of-vision weather station. Okay, that sounds interesting, but he ups the ante when you find out what's included in the system. A stepper motor acts as the generator which powers the electronics. As we've seen before; if you spin the shaft of a stepper motor electricity is produced. … [Read more...]
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