Video Preview: New IOIO prototype

We got our hands on this prototype of the new IOIO design. It’s a breakout board that makes adding hardware to an Android device pretty easy.  [Ytai Ben-Tsvi] sent it our way, and took a bit of time to explain some of the differences between this board and the original version. You can see our video preview embedded after the … Read the rest

How to make your own piezoelectric speaker

Piezoelectric speakers are found all around you, from musical greeting cards to the tweeters in your car stereo setup. Making your own piezo speakers is actually very easy, as [Steven] shows us after replacing the speaker in a clock radio.

Piezo speakers require a small crystal with piezoelectric properties, so this build is the perfect followup to [Steven]‘s tutorial for Read the rest

Ask Hackaday: Who likes retrocomputing?

Last week we posted a link to Project Kiwi, a homebrew Motorola 68008-based microcomputer built by [Simon] that includes Ethernet, a very good display adapter, an interface for IDE hard disks, two Commodore SID chips (for stereo chiptunes), a floppy disk controller, and an already existent software library that will make it very easy to develop your own software … Read the rest

Robotic odometry from an optical mouse

One of the problems future engineers spend a lot of class time solving is the issue of odometry for robots. It’s actually kind of hard to tell how far a robot has traveled after applying power to its wheels, but [John] has a pretty nifty solution to this problem. He converted an optical mouse into an odometry sensor, making … Read the rest

Hackaday Links: Sept 15, 2012

Very tiny keyboard

The idea behind the iControlPad2 is pretty simple – just take the slide-out keyboard from a phone, discard the phone part, add two analog sticks and a D-pad, and put Bluetooth in it. It makes for a very small keyboard perfect for controlling a Raspi, a home media server, or even a phone or tablet. I think Read the rest