Spend your weekend contributing to the exploration of space

Earlier today we posted a link to a tournament NASA is holding. NASA is trying to crowdsource the organization of terabytes of data collected from missions all over the solar system. A few Hackaday readers wrote in (thanks [grbgout] and all the others) to tell us there is an International Space Apps Challenge going on this weekend to crowdsourse … Read the rest

Badges? We don’t need no stinking badges!

In a an obvious marketing move akin to a drug dealer offering up free samples, Urban threads is offering free badge plans for hackerspaces that have robotic embroidery machines. We’ve seen this trend of badges coming up lately and we don’t know if it is the boy/girl scout in us, or the punk rocker that makes us pine for them. … Read the rest

Improving a freestyle kayak

When [Andrea] was looking for a freestyle kayak, he bought the cheap version of a high-end kayak. The hull is exactly the same as the high-end model, but to differentiate between product lines, Pyranha chose to use less expensive fittings. [Andrea] decided to bring his new kayak up to spec (Italian, here’s a Google translation) by fixing the problems … Read the rest

Monitoring air quality with a $12 sensor

[Chris] has allergies, asthma, and uses a wood burning stove. You can imagine why testing his air quality might be something he’d be interested in. He has a very nice $290 laser particle counter, but was really curious how the $12 sharp sensor he found would stack up. To find out, he plugged it into an arduino and started logging Read the rest

Do anything with the help of lucid dreaming goggles

In the world of your dreams, you can build an entire world, an entire universe, an entire society governed by your every whim. While lucid dreaming you are a god in your own mind, free to create or destroy at will. You can train yourself to recognize when you are dreaming, but sometimes a little technological help can speed you … Read the rest

Building the mind of a robot overlord

The folks at the Louisville hackerspace LVL1 now have a fabulous piece of wall art that is also a speech synthesizer. The speech synthesizer is over two feet long and is made of nine panels of stripboard connected with right angle headers. An awesome piece of art if there ever was one.

This speech synthesizer is actually 30 years in … Read the rest

Controlling blinkenlights with modern computers

A few old timers may remember that once, long ago, computers didn’t require keyboards. The earliest personal computers such as the Altair 8800 and the server rack-sized minicomputers like the PDP-11 could be controlled with a panel filled with switches and lights, giving us the term blinkenlights. Today, most of these machines have been thrown away or locked up … Read the rest