Custom Driver Board For Paintball Gun

custom-driver-circuit-for-paintball

[Gabe’s] been wanting to do some embedded development for years, and his other hobby of playing paintball recently provided him with a test project. He’s been working on a custom driver board for his paintball gun.  Don’t be confused by the name, GCode is a mash-up of his name and the fact that he wrote the code for the project. It has nothing to do with the G Code CNC language.

At first this might seem like a trivial hack, but this Viking paintball gun has some serious velocity and throughput so he needs a reliable control that won’t just start shooting randomly. Another thing that [Gabe] took into consideration was monitoring the loading process to make sure the paintball is full seated before firing. All of this is handled by that tiny little Femtoduino board. it interfaces with the guns hardware using the connector board mounted above it.

There are several videos sprinkled throughout the build log. But we found the officially sanctioned 12.5 balls per second mode and the ridiculously fast auto-fire clips the most interesting. It should come in handy when on the run from paintball shotgun wielding opponents.

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The Secret Projects At The RedBull Creation Challenge

You’ve all already seen that there are 6 teams making some kind of a musical instrument. However, there are two more projects that have materialized out of nowhere and are looking like a lot of fun.

In the shop, there are “Shop Monitors”, artists and hackers who are here to help the teams get stuff built. There are also the judges. Since all of us have some experience and craving for making things, you can imagine that no one is just twiddling their thumbs.

[Greg] the lead judge has taken this opportunity to play with the plasma cutter and various metal working tools and is making a voting system so that the public can walk up and hit a button to vote on their favorite. Yup, those are easy buttons you see there. This thing is shaping up to be pretty nice looking thanks to that cutting machine and [Greg’s] hard work.

[JoeJoe], the guy who built the turbull incabulator is building “piss bot”, an inside joke turning to reality. Pissbot  will literally just freak out and urinate all over. Don’t ask why, ask why not.

Raspberry Pi Tor Proxy Lets You Take Anonymity With You

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Your web traffic is being logged at many different levels. There are a few different options to re-implement your privacy (living off the grid excluded), and the Tor network has long been one of the best options. But what about when you’re away from you home setup? Adafruit has your back. They’ve posted a guide which will turn a Raspberry Pi into a portable Tor proxy.

The technique requires an Ethernet connection, but these are usually pretty easy to come by in hotels or relatives’ homes. A bit of work configuring the Linux network components will turn the RPi into a WiFi access point. Connect to it with your laptop or smartphone and you can browse like normal. The RPi will anonymize the IP address for all web traffic.

Leveraging the Tor network for privacy isn’t a new subject for us. We’ve looked at tor acks that go all the way back to the beginnings of Hackaday. The subject comes and goes but the hardware for it just keeps getting better!

Wherein Books Are Judged By Their Cover

Yes, Kindles are wonderful, a computer full of PDFs are awesome, and [Tim Berners-Lee] will probably go down in history as more important than [Gutenberg]. That doesn’t mean there’s not something intangible about books that brings out the affections of so many bibliophiles. Even a book filled with blank pages can be a work of art unto itself, and most of the time these volumes are handmade.

 This video of a hardbound volume made by Smith Settle bookbinders covers the entire process from words on a page to a finished book. No, they’re not using movable type; the folios are created using lithography, but sorting, gluing, sewing and binding the folios is done in much the same way as it was done in the middle ages.

Next up is a wonderful film from 1968 by Iowa state university on creating the gold tooling on fine leather-bound volumes. You’ll be hard pressed to find a book with gold tooling nowadays, but it’s still a technique accessible to the industrious amateur bookbinder.

First, gold leaf is applied to the leather spine of a book. Then, custom-made tools are heated to a few hundred degrees  and pressed into the leaf. The heat bonds the gold with the leather, and with custom-designed tools designs are burnt into the leather. After that, the excess leaf is simply wiped off, and a fine tooled leather book is born.

What’s really cool about bookbinding is the fact that just about anyone can do it. Go to a craft store, pick up some hardboard and paper, and bind yourself a book. You could make a blank journal, or for the nerds out there (myself included), make a hard bound volume of the NASA wiring standards.

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