200 pound, WiFi deploying robot ran over my foot

wibot

[Adam Bercu] and [Dan Landers] from Artisan's Asylum in Somerville, MA brought a very, very cool toy to Maker Faire this year. It's a two hundred pound WiFi repeater deploying robot able to amble across unforgiving terrain and my foot. The robot is controlled through a web interface with the help of a front-mounted web cam with pan and tilt controls. All the signals are sent through a WiFi … [Read more...]

Laser-etched LED zeotrope looks like a circular monochrome screen

laser-etched-led-zeotrope

The still image of this animated display really doesn't do it justice. But you can get an idea of how this really does look like an old monochrome display. It's actually a zeotrope made from LEDs and etched acrylic. The LEDs blink at a rate that synchronizes with the spinning acrylic to produce an animated image. You probably already know that a zeotrope uses moving physical models to trick the … [Read more...]

LVDS on an FPGA could make it possible to reuse laptops LCDs and the like

LVDS-Display-Controller-V1.0

Search around the Internet and you'll find a landfill of forum threads asking how to drive the LCD screen from a dead laptop. The answer is always that there is just no way to do it. That's because most of them use a Low-Voltage Differential Signalling protocol that just isn't available through the hardware used in hobby projects. But the appearance of this board could signal that things are about … [Read more...]

Breadboarding with a 144-core processor

greenarrays-144-core-processor-breadboarding

At the center of that green PCB is a tiny little processor with way too many cores. It's the GA144 which was taken for a test-drive on a breadboard by [Andrew Back]. We saw a multi-core Kickstarter project last month. This will cost a lot less and get you more than twice the number of cores. But as was mentioned in the comments on that post, the drawback is the programming language. This chip's … [Read more...]

Hackaday Links: October 3, 2012

links-cheap-ergonomic-mouse

Cheap ergonomic mouse If your had keeps cramping while using the computer mouse why not grab a hunk of wood and a couple of buttons to make your own ergonomic input device? C# GUI for Arduino testing Here's a Windows GUI for controlling Arduino. [Rohit] put it together using C#. It should make development very simple as you have control of almost everything before you need to … [Read more...]

How TO dim EL wire: Current limiting the oscillator!

DreamZapper

[Ch00f] finally made a breakthrough with his efforts dimming EL wire.  He's been at it for months and the last we heard his TRIAC idea had sputtered out. Not to be discouraged and with an determination we have to admire he has been hard at work reverse engineering others' and developing his own methods. He put all of this knowledge to task helping a friend of his with a sleeping disorder, and … [Read more...]

Finally, an ARM-powered Arduino

DUE

Far removed from the legions of 3D printers featured at this year's Maker Faire in New York was a much smaller, but far more impressive announcement: The ARM-powered Arduino DUE is going to be released later this month. Instead of the 8-bit AVR microcontrollers usually found in Arduinos, the DUE is powered by an ATSAM3X8E microcontroller, itself based on the ARM Cortex-M3 platform. There are a … [Read more...]