[Fall Deaf] built an Arduino based universal remote control system. It uses a shield which has both an IR receiver and transmitter. This gives it the tools to learn codes from your existing remotes and play them back in order to control the devices. This functionality is really nothing new, but we think the user interface he developed for the system is absolutely fantastic!

Software is web-based. You can simply point a remote at the Arduino and push a button. The receiver will store the code which can later be assigned to a virtual button. The image above shows the channel-up option being created; it will be added to the list once confirmed. From there any web enabled device – smart phone, tablet, netbook, etc – can be used as the remote for the system. The only feature we think is missing is the ability to alter the layout of the buttons, with larger areas for the most frequently used commands.

After the break you can see a demonstration of this system, as well as the one extra feature we haven’t touched on yet. [Fall Deaf] included a Piezo element in the hardware design which lets him knock on his coffee table to use the remote if a smart-device isn’t close at hand.

This is the Raspberry Pi board, an ARM based GNU-Linux computer. We’ve heard a little bit about it, but it recently garnered our attention when the machine was shown running XBMC at 1080p. That’s a lot of decoding to be done with the small package, and it’s taken care of at the hardware level.

Regular readers will know we’re fans of the XBMC project and have been looking for a small form factor that can be stuck on the back of a television. We had hoped it would be the BeagleBaord but that never really came to fruition. But this really looks like it has potential, and with a price tag of $35 (that’s for the larger 256MB RAM option) it’s a no-brainer.

Now there’s still a lot of rumors out there. We came across one thread that speculated the device will not decode video formats other than h.264 very well since it uses hardware decoding for that codec only. We’ll reserve judgement until there’s more reliable info. But you can dig through this forum thread where the XMBC dev who’s been working with the hardware is participating in the discussion.

Don’t forget to peek at the demo clip after the break too.

[via Reddit]

It happens to the best of designers, spending untold amounts of time designing a complex device just to find out that you missed a trace, or you couldn’t rout something to something else. As time marches on its becoming a bit less common to pop open a commercially produced device and see a little jumper wire or 2 flying across a pcb, or a resistor straddling an IC.

But when [Ilektron] opened up a Yamaha Dolby Pro Logic receiver to scavenge for parts he saw a very big “oops” and a even wilder fix. The maker took a pair of relays, flipped them “belly up” and hot glued them into place on top of a pair of ICs. Then the mess was “dead bug” wired to the circuit using insulated and uninsulated bus wire, contacts were then reinforced / insulated using more hot glue.

This is one of the most hacky fix we have seen in a commercially produced product, but we would love to hear your amusing horror stories of “WTH did they do?” So join us in the comments after the break.

This isn’t an airplane, it’s a simulator. But you won’t find it at a flight school as this labor of love is a home build of a 737 cockpit (translated) that has been going on for more than two years.

It started off as a couple of automotive bucket seats in a room with two computer monitors to display the view out the windscreen. From there each piece has been meticulously added for a wonderful overall reproduction. The range of skills needed to pull this off is impressive. The seats have been rebuilt with padding and upholstery true to the Boeing factory options. The support structure that forms the domed front of the aircraft was built from wood with a metal bracket system to hold the overhead control panels in the right position. The only thing missing here is the rest of the plane. Take a look at the simulated landing run in the video after the break to see what this thing can do.

Looking for something that will take you for a bit more of a ride? Here’s a collection of motion simulators that might satisfy your craving.

[Thanks Andreas]

We’re guessing that if you ever though of buying an arcade cabinet it was only briefly, and you decided against based on the difficulties of moving and finding a place for such a large and heavy item. You could go the opposite way and build a controller for a  MAME box, but for some, there’s no replacement for the real hardware. This Christmas gift is the best of both worlds, a JAMMA box which uses traditional hardware in a more compact cabinet.

[Majtolycus'] boy friend is a sucker for a game of Battle Balls. She looked around for an original logic board and after several weeks of searching had to settle for the Japanese version of the game called Senkyu. To patch into the board she also picked up a JAMMA harness, power supply, RGB to VGA video converter, speaker, and some Happ arcade controls. The whole thing goes into a wood box which connects to a VGA monitor (or the VGA port on your HDTV).

The system is easier to store than a full-sized cabinet, and if a deal comes along, you can buy additional JAMMA logic boards to play.

[Thanks Adam]

[Entropia] is just putting the final touches on his bar-top MAME cabinet (translated). The project started out as a 3D model to get the case dimensions just right. An old laptop is being, so the enclosure was designed to fit the bare LCD assembly and hide the rest of the computer. [Entropia] had access to a CNC mill through an education program and used it to cut most of the parts for the case out of MDF.

From there the build proceeds as normal. Mounting holes for the controls were cut with a drill and hole saws. We think it’s a bit easier to lay this design out once you have the control panel itself milled, rather than try to get it right in the 3D model. The image above is part way through the build. Since it was taken the case has been painted and a sound system was added but it looks like it’s still waiting for a bezel over the LCD and a marquee for the masthead.

You can see a demo of the game selection UI after the break.

[Thanks Lauri]

[Garrett Mace] decided to beef up his 58 inches of plasma with 60 Watts of LED lighting. After seeing a ton of Ambilight clones using his LED modules, he’s built his own powerful system. Not surprisingly, it’s nothing short of professional-grade work.

Kudos to [Garrett] for showing the entire process in the video after the break. We’re talking about his planning stages, which are so often left out of build logs. He first measures the back of the television, and does some testing for distance and angle of the Satellite LED modules to establish how many should be used and to estimate the optimal spacing. From there he modelled a framing system before getting down to the actual build.

The wood frame is made up of a box with a horizontal crossbar serving as a place to mount the drivers. Around the edges, tilting rails were added to make the angle of the LED modules adjustable. As with many other Ambilight clones, [Garrett] uses the boblight software to drive his system and we appreciate it that he included his configuration file for reference. Once up and running the effect is breathtaking (and possibly blinding).

Legalities of doing something like this aside, this concept by [MadSci labs] gives some insight into how one would go about recording a 3D movie in 3D.  Probably many of you have wondered if this could be done, but they took it one step further and actually made a device capable of doing just that.

[MadSci labs] solution involved taking some 3D glasses home from a theater, cutting them to size, and taping them to a HTC EVO 3D phone.  Each lens piece was taped over a different camera lens to separate out the two 3D elements needed to produce a stereoscopic image. Their experiment was successful, however some loss of quality was experienced.  Because of this, we’re not expecting to see a lot of in-theater movies pirated this way, but given a more professional-quality build, you never know what will happen.

You can see the “results” of their experiment after the break. As it’s not in 3D, it should give you an idea of what is going on.

[Eric Wolfram] wrote in to let us know about a simple and cheap acoustic panel DIY he put together.  When installing a home theater acoustics are often neglected (especially if you spend so much on the TV you cannot afford any furniture for the room) resulting in reduced listening quality and poor spacial sound imaging from your surround system (also responsible for the furniture problem). The addition of sound absorbing panels helps control the acoustics of the room and may even class up the place a bit.  These are also come in handy for home studio usage where a low level of reverberation is preferred.

The panels are relatively simple to produce on a budget, just a sheet of 2″ thick dense fiberglass board glued into a wooden frame and covered in a sound-transparent fabric. [Eric] goes into a lot of the material selection process to help you along your way. The best part about the project (aside from its obvious utility) is that all of the materials can be found cheaply at your average home improvement store, with the exception of the fabric.  [Eric] mentions that you can substitute colored burlap if need be.  Once the panel is assembled and glued it just has to be hung on the wall of your choice like a large heavy picture frame. This could certainly help the acoustics and reduce some slap-back echo in your warehouse/shop. We might have to try this one over the weekend.

Thanks [Eric]!

Finally, the USB port on the back of your television can be tapped for something useful. [Don] is using this add-on device to automatically cut the power to his Ambilight clone. Initially, he got tired of unplugging the power adapter each time he shut off the television, so he added a switch. But laziness overcame him and he decided he needed an automatic method. After probing around on the connections available, he established that the serial interface (normally used for servicing the device) was not of any use, but the USB port is. He measured the voltage of the power bus to be 5V when the TV is on, and 0.15V when it is off. He whipped up the circuit you see above which uses the USB connection to trigger a relay, connecting power to his Ambilight clone when the television comes on, and disconnecting it when the set is switched off.

Our dream has always been an XBMC capable device that can Velcro to the back of a TV, and be powered from that USB port. Unfortunately the Beagle Board hasn’t yet made it to a stable level when running XBMC. Our next hope is the AppleTV 2, which can run XBMC but would require some hacking to get it working off of the USB port, raising concerns about how much current it would draw at 5V.

[Ron] was looking for a way to play his MP3s around the house without having to use his computer. He also wanted the ability to remotely control his tunes with an old camcorder remote he had sitting around – not exactly a feature you would find in an off the shelf personal audio player.

Ultimately, he decided to construct his own remote-controlled audio player using a VMUSIC2 audio module, which can decode MP3s from any standard USB drive. The VMUSIC2 is controlled by a Propeller demo board, which also handles receiving and decoding IR signals from his camcorder remote. While he was originally dumping ID3 tag data to his computer for debugging purposes, he recently added an LCD screen for displaying song information in a more useful manner.

The MP3 player seems to work pretty well if the video below is any indication, though it’s begging for a nice enclosure to tie things together. We like the project so far, so we’re sure [Ron] won’t fail to impress when it’s completely finished.

[zmashiah] has a nice Nova tube amplifier in his living room, and he often forgets to turn it off once he’s done listening to music. He feels guilty when this happens, as it not only shortens the lifespan of his stereo, but it’s not exactly the greenest behavior either. Rather than let his receiver idle any longer, he built a simple device that automatically turns it off when he forgets.

He wired an Arduino to the line level output of the receiver, sampling the audio every two seconds. When five minutes pass without an audio signal, the Arduino sends an IR command to the receiver, turning it off.

He says he’s aware that it might be overkill to use an Arduino for this application, but that he would rather fork out an extra dollar or two instead of spending hours poring over AVR assembly code. While we’re all for efficiency, we can’t exactly argue with that logic – time is money!

[zmashiah] is kind enough to include his schematics as well as the code for his project, so be sure to check it out if you occasionally forget to turn off your IR-enabled appliances.

The latest and greatest ambilight clone, the Adalight, comes from the fruitful mind and cluttered workbench of the sometimes Hack A Day contributor [Phil Burgess].

We’ve seen a few clones of the Philips ambilight tech, but [Phil] knocked this one out of the park. The hardware is a string of 12mm RGB LEDs connected to the Arduino of your choosing. After attaching the LEDs to the rear of the TV using anything from, “laser-cut acrylic to nothing more than a pizza box,” it’s on to the software.

The Processing sketch performs a series of screen captures and averages the pixels around the perimeter of the screen. Reportedly, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos looks fantastic with the Adalight but there might be a better option.

[Phil] used 25 LEDs on his Adalight, more than the usual 6-10 we see on other Ambilight clones. Check out the video after the break to see the Adalight in action.

[James] is one of those guys on a quest to control everything with one device. His tool of choice is an Android phone, which can do quite a lot right out of the box. But he was never satisfied with its lack of IR remote control abilities. He fixed that feature-gap by building a Bluetooth to Infrared translator.

The hardware he used for the prototype is quite simple. A cheap serial Bluetooth modem from eBay lets him connect to his phone. An Arduino board listens for data from the modem and converts incoming commands to flashes on an IR LED. Voila, he can control the tube with his phone.

We love the potential of this hack. The Bluetooth module runs from 3.3V, and reading serial data and flashing an LED is extremely simple. You should be able to use a small uC, say an ATtiny13, and a 3.3V regulator to miniaturize the module. We could see this plugging into the USB port on the back of a TV for power, with a wire extension to put the LED into position. The only shortfall is the inability to turn the TV on remotely when drawing power this way.

Remote codes aren’t particularly large to store either. So this would be pretty easy to extend to full control of all IR-compatible home entertainment devices. You just need a tool to discover the remote control codes.

[Don] put together a guide that will help you build your own Ambilight Clone for about $40 plus the cost of an Arduino. He’s using it with the HTPC seen above, and utilized modular concepts in building it so that you can easily disconnect your Arduino board when you want to use it for prototyping.

For RGB light sources [Don] grabbed six ShiftBrite modules. These are fully addressable cascading modules which make for very easy hardware setup. Instead of buying a driver shield he built his own using an LM317, heat sink, and wall wart to source enough current to drive all of the modules.

We really enjoy the mounting scheme used. Each module is attached to a piece of acrylic which is then mounted using the standard threaded VESA mounting holes on the back of the monitor. As with other Ambilight clones this one uses the Boblight package to get color information from the video as it plays.