Papydoo is Watching You!

Papydoo spends most of its time sleeping, but if startled by vibration it will wake up and stare you down with a cold and unnerving robo-gaze like you have not seen before. Or it might just do something crazy like display a scrolling Space Invaders character marquee.  That’s the thing with Papydoo, you just never know.

Vibration sensing is accomplished … Read the rest

Trackuino – an Open Source Arduino APRS Tracker

trackuino board

Trackuino is a new open source (GPLv2 license) Arduino APRS tracker designed by [Javier Martin]. If you are unfamiliar: APRS (Automatic Packet Reporting System) is an amateur radio method used to relay small packets of position-tracking data to an online database for easy access and mapping. In this case, GPS telemetry data is used to track latitude, longitude, altitude, course, … Read the rest

Oscilloscope Piano Tuning 101

fft on scope

[Todd Harrison] recently wrote in to tip us off on his submission to the Tektronix oscilloscope contest – using a scope to tune a piano. In his video he demonstrates how a Fast Fourier Transform can be used to determine the fundamental frequency of the note being played. This is a quick and easy way to determine if that … Read the rest

OSHW Logo Announced

The results are in and the new Open Hardware logo has been selected! After tallying nearly 9,000 votes it has been decided that “Golden Orb” by Macklin Chaffe will now represent the OSHW definition v1.0.

Rest assured that despite earlier controversy regarding a few users that had submitted a very large number of duplicate votes (over 3,100 in all), … Read the rest

Giant Scale Printer

Giant Printer Print Head

This giant printer was originally constructed by [Komponent/LAB] in 2006 to print some large-format banners for a festival, but has recently been pulled out of storage and updated for the Venture Cup competition. The system received a few mechanical and software updates and was also mounted on tripods in order to make it fully portable.

Instead of using stepper … Read the rest

How Low Can You Go?

That’s exactly what [Kenneth Finnegan] figured out with his original investigation into low powered MSP430-based circuits. He was able to keep a count-up timer running off of 20F worth of capacitors for over 10 weeks. Although quite impressive by its own merit, many people left comments that questioned whether similar results would be seen in a circuit with functionality more … Read the rest

PID Sous-Vide Slow Cooker – Bon Appétit!

In search of a perfectly-cooked brisket, [Aaron] recently completed this DIY  PID-controlled sous-vide slow cooker. Sous-vide (French for “under vacuum”) is a cooking technique in which foods are typically vacuum-sealed and then cooked in a relatively low temperature water bath for an extended period of time. This is done to minimize temperature gradients throughout the food to ensure even … Read the rest