Automatic beer pourer was hacked together from a bit of everything

beer-conveyor

This thing is really remarkable. It’s a beer draft system that automatically fills and distributes to your party guests. The approach is something of an industrial revolution for parties. A hopper feeds cups to the tap; once filled they are whisked off to thirsty guests using a conveyor belt system.

Many of the parts come from a washing machine that … Read the rest

Laser Kaleidoscope uses more 3D printing and less scavenging

laser-kaleidoscope

At first we thought that [Pete Prodoehl] was using the wrong term when calling his project a Laser Kaleidoscope. We usually think of a kaleidoscope as a long tube with three mirrors and some beads or glass shards in one end. But we looked it up and there’s a second definition that means a constantly changing pattern. This fits … Read the rest

Critter cam hacked from an old cellphone.

critter-cam-hacked-from-old-cellphone

[Art Barrios] kept having night-time visitors who were raiding his dog’s food storage bin. It’s a plastic tub with a lid that latches but the critters were knocking it over and popping that lid off. He wanted to find out which animal was the culprit so he hacked together an automatic camera system using an old cellphone.

You can … Read the rest

Veronica 6502 computer reaches Hello World stage

veronica-hello-world

The screenshot on the right shows [Quinn Dunki's] computer project displaying a Hello World program. Well, it’s only showing the word Hello right now, but the concept is the same. This proves that native 6502 code is running on the processor and reliably outputting data through its VGA hardware. That’s a welcome achievement after watching so much work go … Read the rest

Using a flashing LCD monitor to transfer data

lcd-screen-data-transferWe love the concept of using an LCD screen to transfer data. The most wide-spread and successful method we know of is the combination of a QR code and the camera on a smart phone. But for less powerful/costly devices data can be transferred simply by flashing colors on the screen. That’s what [Connor Taylor] is testing out with this … Read the rest

Ubuntu with a GUI on a Beagleboard

beagle

The Raspberry Pi is great if you’re looking for a cheap yet powerful computer running Linux, but let’s not forget all the other ARM dev boards out there. [Adam] spent some time this weekend putting together an Ubuntu distro for his Beagleboard XM to give it the convenience of a GUI and a whole bunch of drivers to get a … Read the rest

SCARA arm finally prints plastic parts

SCARA

Here’s a neat alternative to the usual gantry setup you see on 3D printers. [Quentin] designed and build a SCARA arm 3D printer that just saw its first print.

We caught wind of [Quentin]‘s SCARA arm a few weeks ago when it was still just a few plastic parts and a glimmer of ambition in its creator’s eye. Most … Read the rest