Fresh hacks every day
This Tweeting cat door uses the Electric Imp to read a sensor and report back to the server. The hardware is pretty neat. The board hosts an ARM Cortex-M3 processor and gets on your home network via WiFi. The mini-USB cable simply provides the power. Programming is done over the network. Our own [Brian Benchoff] had a chance to try the Imp out earlier in the Fall. Monitoring a cat door is as … [Read more...]
[Lambgx02] got tired of his Android device getting bogged down and decided to dig down to the cause of the issue. His investigation led him to believe that entropy is causing the slowdown. He believes that his workaround reduces 90% of the lag on the average Android device. So how is it possible that entropy is causing the problem? It seems there is a bottleneck when an app requests a random … [Read more...]
Many motors offer a quadrature encoder that give feedback on whether, and in which direction, the motor shaft is moving. But if you're clever about analyzing the data you can use a quadrature encoder to estimate motor velocity. [Jason Sachs] makes the case that it's fairly easy to get this wrong. Lucky for us he has carefully laid out his process of extrapolating velocity from the two edge-trigger … [Read more...]
[Shaun Gehring] wanted an Internet radio player. Although he did have some troubles along the way, the final project turned out very well. Housed inside this case which used to house a spindle of bland CDs is a Raspberry Pi that plays Pandora radio and serves as an AirPlay receiver. The GPIO header of the RPi makes this project a lot easier. [Shaun] used Adafruit's breakout board to solder … [Read more...]
This Van de Graaf generator was built using mostly parts on hand. The only thing that was purchased for the project was the Christmas ornament shaped M&M candy tin that serves as the collecting sphere. We didn't include the in-action shot in the banner because it's so dark. But sure enough, this will generate the visible sparks that make the device famous. The gist of the device is that it … [Read more...]
For those that are into reloading their own ammo you know that getting an efficient assembly line process figured out will make your sessions much more enjoyable and productive. [Msoejacobsk] knew that he could buy a case feeder for his system, but didn't want to shell out two hundred bucks for it. After a bit of thought he was able to build this case feeder for around ten dollars. The purpose … [Read more...]
Several times a day, a NOAA weather satellite passes over your head, beaming down pictures of weather systems and cloud formations. These transmissions aren't encrypted, and given the requisite hardware it's possible for you to download these images from space as [Lovro] shows us in a tutorial video. To get these near real-time satellite pictures, [Lovro] used one of those USB TV tuners we've … [Read more...]
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