Over engineering windshield wipers to sync to music

In the late 90s, Volkswagen aired a series of awesome television advertisements that won a few awards relevant to those in advertising circles. One of these ads was titled Synchronicity and showed a VW Jetta’s windshield wipers (among other things) syncing to music as the car drove down a rainy alley. [ch00f] thought beat tracking wipers would make for a … Read the rest

Hackday Links: March 10, 2012

We’re throwing money at our monitor and nothing’s happening!

Sometimes we get hacks sent into our tip line that are outrageously awesome, but apart from a YouTube video we’ve got nothing else to write about. So begins the story of the flying Back to the Future DeLorean quadrocopter. Sadly, the story ends with the video as well. (If you’ve … Read the rest

Adding a laser sight to your drill press in just a few easy steps

drill-press-laser-sight

[Derek] was using his Dremel drill press to prep a bunch of PCBs, and found that it was getting difficult to focus on the spinning drill bit each time to line it up with the solder pads on the boards. He figured that a laser sight would help move the process along, but since no off the shelf solution was … Read the rest

3D printing from an Android device

[skullkey] over at the House4Hack hackerspace in Pretoria, South Africa wanted a way to get kids excited about technology and desktop fabrication labs. Wanting to give kids a visceral feel for the march of technology, he created Makerdroid, an android app that allows for the creation 3D objects on an Android tablet and preparing them to be printed on … Read the rest

Steganography in xkcd comics without the img alt tag

Inspired by a recent Hackaday post [austin] decided to try his hand at steganography. Steganography, or ‘concealed writing’ has come a long way from ancient Greek slaves/couriers shaving their head, tattooing a message on their scalp, and regrowing their hair. We recently saw a music file masquerading as a picture of a kitten, but that method of … Read the rest