Redesigning the RC tank

[Vincent] started building this tank (translation) with a regular hobby model: the Heng Long Tiger 1. However, after considering some goals for the project, he decided to nearly gut the tank and redesign it, basing it on the Arduino and a standard Motor Shield. The possibilities with this setup are nearly endless. In its current form, the … Read the rest

Bench power supply resetting thingy

As is common among some hackers, [Henry] re-purposed an ATX power supply unit to function as a bench power supply for testing circuits on a breadboard (much like this fancy example).

However, safety mechanisms on some modern PC PSUs do not automatically reset after over-current protection has kicked in, which soon became annoying for [Henry]. In order to make … Read the rest

Free (…as in ‘free beer’) ARM kit

NXP holds a lot of market share for their ARM based solutions as it is. That’s why we were a little surprised when we found a link on their website announcing that they were giving away free LPCXpresso development boards, based on their Cortex-M0 line.

Catches? Unfortunately there are a few to get the board shipped and running. In … Read the rest

STK200 pocket change programmer

A common complaints of beginners to microcontroller programming is the availability of DIY tools that do not require a parallel port.  Using not much more than a couple of 74xx series chips and some protoboard, [Rue] was able to create an AVR programmer for less than the cost of some chips it can program – giving parallel programmers a run … Read the rest

Have a face for radio?

The help of fellow members of the Austrian technology collective/hackerspace [Otelo] allowed [Georg] to develop a networked audio streaming board, with less than $20 worth of components. Dubbed the OggStreamer for obvious reason, it’s designed to relay audio from a mixing board to an Icecast server (an open source implementation of SHOUTcast) in real-time. The board is based … Read the rest

DIY Guided Missile (…err model rocket)

Hackers [Navic] and [K.o.D] have fitted an Arduino Pro Mini and an array of components into an off the shelf rocketry kit to create a guided model rocket, taking the whole idea of Arduino-based space technology to another level

The Arduino reads signals from internally mounted accelerometers, and adjusts balsa fins (via 4 micro servos) to correct the rocket’s … Read the rest

Arduino Space Program

With the recently proposed cuts to NASA, our friends across the pond (in Northampton UK) decided to take action with a space program of their own… at least at a miniature scale. NortHACKton, a hackerspace in Northampton decided to host a rocketry day consisting of rockets powered by chemical reactions, pressurized water bottles, and even one that employed an … Read the rest