Washing machines that do it without electricity

washing-machines-without-electricity

Those of us living in the first world take clean clothes for granted. Throw them in the washing machine, transfer to the dryer after 45 minutes, and you won't smell for another two weeks or so. But for people living in areas without electricity, clean clothes are a huge amount of work. Hand washing a family's clothes is estimated at 6 hours per day, three to five days per week. Here's a post that … [Read more...]

Autonomous fixed-wing drone threads the needled in a parking garage

autonomous-fixed-wing-drone

We've got something of a love affair going on with quadcopters, but there's still room for a little something on the side. This fixed-wing drone can pull off some pretty amazing navigation. MIT's Robust Robotics Group is showing off the work they've done with the plane, culminating in a death-defying flight through a parking garage (video after the break). This may not sound like a huge … [Read more...]

Raspberry Pi wedded to a DSLR

rasberry-pi-for-your-dslr

This is a Raspberry Pi outfitted in a DSLR battery grip. [Dave H] was very interested in the idea of combining a single-board computer with a high-end camera. The size and cost of such a computer was prohibitive until the RPi came along. He managed to fit the board into the broken battery grip he had on hand, and he already has the prototype up and running. [Dave's] alterations to the battery … [Read more...]

Building an LED suit

led-suit-build

[Rob] has been hard at work designing and buildingĀ this LED suit which he can wear to parties. He's got it working, although right now it's just a pair of pants. It reacts to sound, and has the potential to be controlled from a smartphone via Bluetooth. You'll find a video description of the build embedded after the break. The planning started off by selecting driver hardware for the LEDs. … [Read more...]

Adding inductive charging to an Android tablet

inductive-charging-for-an-android-tablet

This is a Gemei G9T, a 9.7" Tablet running Android 4.0. [Carnivore] shows us how to modify it to use inductive charging. The inductive charging hardware is taken from a Palm device (this uses the Touchstone charging hardware seen in several other hacks). It's easy to interface with the tablet's electronics, but physically placing the coil and magnets is another story. The video after the break … [Read more...]

Cat palace with an automatic heat lamp

cat-bed-with-automatic-heat-lamp

[Herpity] was getting tired of his cat manipulating him into turning on a lamp above her bed every time she wanted a nap. She likes the warmth put off by the light bulb but he knew he could do better than that so he built a bed which includes an automatic heat lamp. To help introduce her to the new enclosure he set it on the chair where she normally naps. The bed has two parts, the lower … [Read more...]

Toorcamp: Milling PCBs With KiCad

PCB Milling

[Hao] from Noisebridge showed me their CNC mill being used to etch PCBs. Using copper clad board, this MAXNC 10 mill routes the PCB with decent accuracy. This makes for very rapid prototyping of single sided PCBs. [Hao] designed the PCB using the open source KiCadĀ EDA tool. This was used to draw the schematic, layout the PCB, and generate the Gerber files. Next, pcb2gcode was used to convert … [Read more...]