Back up the band with some RGB stage lights

buiding-rgb-stage-lighting

Fresh off the 72-hour madness of the Red Bull Creation contest some of the folks a North Street Labs took on a stage lighting project. It's for a local performing venue that just opened up, and despite the time crunch the team pulled off another great build. Sixteen meters of LED strip make the electronics for the project a whole lot easier. The strips run up the center of a cabinets built as … [Read more...]

Robot servo control using smartphone audio jack

robot-servo-control-using-smartphone-audio-jack

[Jim] has an old Android phone he'd like to use as a Robot brain. It's got a lot of the things you'd want in a robot platform; WiFi, Bluetooth, a camera, an accelerometer, etc. But he needed some way to make the mobile, mobile. What he came up with is a chassis with servos that can be controlled by the phone's audio port. To start his adventure he crafted a square wave audio file in Audacity … [Read more...]

Toorcamp: MC Hawking Robotic Wheelchair

MC Hawking

This is the MC Hawking robot built by the Noisebridge hackerspace in San Francisco. It's a robotic electric wheelchair outfitted with a PC, an XBox Kinect, and an Arduino. On the software side, it uses Ubuntu and the open source ROS platform. A few folks from Noisebridge were hacking away on the robot at Toorcamp to add a robotic arm and other upgrades. One goal of the project was to build a … [Read more...]

How to design your own LED driver

LED-driver-board

If you find yourself in need of a driver for a high power string of LEDs this is a must read. [Limpkin] just designed this driver as a contract job. He can't show us the schematic, but he did share some tips on how to build an LED driver around a MAX16834 chip. As you move to higher power designs the barriers to success pile up rather quickly. Using a chip like the MAX16834 really helps to … [Read more...]

Toorcamp: The American Hacker Camp

toorcamp

Toorcamp is all wrapped up after four great days of talks, hacking, and parties. Located in Neah Bay, Washington, Toorcamp was a four day event modelled after European hacker camps. This is the second time Toorcamp has been run, and it's clear that both the organizers and attendees know how to throw an awesome stateside hacker camp. The camp featured talks, including keynotes by [Joe Grand] … [Read more...]

Work station includes a Smartcard lock for USB ports

smartcard-locks-usb-ports

The USB ports on this work station are locked. In order to use a USB device you'll need to insert a Smartcard into the reader seen above. The interesting thing here is that this shouldn't affect your ability to charge a USB device. When you visit the link above make sure to check out the worklog tab as it contains nine pages worth of build information. The device is conceived of in two parts. … [Read more...]

RGB chandelier may not fly with the wife

remote-control-rbd-chandelier

We understand where [Craig] is coming from, leaving no stone unturned when looking for new electronic projects to occupy his time. He tried to convince his wife that they needed a light show to accompany dinner, and while she was skeptical he went ahead and built this remote control RGB chandelier anyway. He recently purchased fifteen feet of RGB LED strip and has since been trying to use it in … [Read more...]