A solar powered cattle crossing gate

solar-powered-cattle-crossing-gate

Anyone who's traveled the grounds of a cattle ranch will tell you there's a lot of stopping to open and close gates. But this project is aimed at letting you operate the gate from the comfort of your vehicle. It uses a spool of wire as the gate, lowering it for vehicle access with the use of a remote control. The base station uses a solar panel to keep the battery topped off. But if you're not … [Read more...]

Hackaday Links: February 28th, 2013

links-decapping-chips

Xbox 360 control for a toy heli [Jason] leveraged the IR control libraries for Arduino to use an Xbox 360 controller to fly his Syma S107G helicopter. Windows 7 running on Raspberry Pi Why, oh god why? Well, the guys at Shackspace got their hands on a laser cutter that can only be driven with a Windows program. Their solution was to run Win7 on RPi as a virtual … [Read more...]

Optical data transfer project at local school’s family science night

optical-data-at-family-science-night

[Dave] wanted to show off a project at his 4th-grade son's school during their family science night. We haven't heard of an event like this before but it sounds like a fabulous idea! He had a new laser he wanted to include in the project, and noticed that his son was learning about how ASCII maps letters to binary number when the idea struck. He ended up building an optical data transfer system … [Read more...]

Bending materials with a simple hot wire forming tool

bending-with-a-hot-wire-former

Regular reader [RoadWarrior222] has watched as we've featured several projects that show how to bend acrylic. But so far he hasn't seen us cover his favorite technique developed by [Dale A. Heatherington] which uses a hot wire forming tool to make precise bends. The tool is simple to use plus it's cheap and easy to build. It's a great choice if you don't have a heat gun, and it may be possible to … [Read more...]

Hacking a Ham Radio

Hacked Ham Radio

For Christmas, [Lior] received a Baofeng UV5R radio. He didn't have an amateur radio license, so he decided to use it as a police scanner. Since the schematics were available, he cracked it open and hacked it. This $40 radio communicates on the 136-174 MHz and 400-480 MHz bands. It uses a one-time programmable microcontroller and the RDA1846 transceiver. With the power traces to the MCU … [Read more...]

Uzebox Coding Challenge

Uzebox Coding Challenge 2013

The 2013 Uzebox Coding Challenge is currently underway. This competition runs until June 1st, with registration open until April 1st. The Uzebox is an open source, 8 bit game console that uses only two chips: an ATmega644 microcontroller and a AD725 RGB to NTSC converter. We've featured it a few times in the past. The competition rules are pretty loose: build a game or a useful piece of … [Read more...]

Adding a home theater without ruining a Victorian home

projector-screen-in-a-victorian-home

We understand where [John Clarke Mills] is coming from when he says he wants a home theater but not at the expense of dedicating a room to it. His situation is a bit more sticky than most folks in that he has a beautifully kept Victorian era home. Recently he was removing a renovation from ages past that didn't fit with the style and it gave him the opportunity to build in this hidden projector … [Read more...]