Fresh hacks every day
If you're looking to learn the art of playing Japanese drums, or Taiko, this hack, done as a school project by [Cornell] students, could be a really helpful aid. The project write-up is very impressive and includes a detailed explanation of their work, the source code, and a bill of materials if you'd like to try to duplicate this device. The tutor device is able to tell between soft hits, hard … [Read more...]
Our days by the pool are behind us for the year. But playing pirate ship with a 2-year-old does sound like quite a bit of fun. That's why [The Stone Donkey] built this pirate cannon prop complete with firing sounds. The simplicity of the design is pretty brilliant. Three segments of PVC and five fittings make for a realistic looking barrel that won't throw your back out when you pull this one … [Read more...]
Soft robots are a peculiar wing of technology. They don't use frames and motors for locomotion, but as the name implies they are made of soft materials. They move by pumping fluid -- it could be air or liquid -- in and out of bladders that push or pull against the body itself. [Matthew] points out that fabricating soft robots has traditionally been a time-consuming and difficult task. He's trying … [Read more...]
[Udo] decided to build a clock using the DCF77 radio module seen above. This of course has been done before: the hardware draws a clock signal from the atomic clock in Braunschweig, Germany. So he grabbed a library for Arduino and got to work. But he was getting rather poor results and upon further investigation realized that the library had been written for 20 Hz modules and his operates at 300 … [Read more...]
Sure, it's time to get the countdown clocks ready to ring in the new year, but why limit it to just one night? If you end up building a six-foot digital display you can count down trivial events; like the remaining seconds of freedom before you have to pimp yourself out in that drab cubicle. This seven-segment display is homemade and boasts six full-sized digits and two smaller digits with each … [Read more...]
There are several things that we really like about the TI Stellaris. We think the peripheral library -- called Stellarisware -- has a pretty intuitive API that makes it easy to get into. But we're also quite impressed that the software comes with makefiles that build the libraries and examples using your own GCC cross compiling toolchain. We spent quite a bit of time pawing through those makefiles … [Read more...]
Wanting to control a split flap display that was not near a computer [Tom] looked to a common solution for communicating over distances not practical for I2C or SPI. He developed his own hardware and packet format using the RS-485 protocol. This is part of a larger project he has been working on to feed data to a split flap display that he plans to hang on the wall. RS-485 is designed to work … [Read more...]
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