[Claudio] was working on a homebrew oscilloscope project when he started thinking about how unsuitable a standard breadboard is for a large-scale project. Rather than adding components on top of components until they became what he lovingly calls a “fragile, unforgiving crapstack”, he decided to build himself the Ultimate Breadboard.

He packed so much into his design, that it’s honestly hard to know where to begin describing it. Aside from an appropriately large breadboarding surface embedded in the center of the console, he added a power supply to the left hand side, which sits just below an Avr-Net-IO board. The right side of the console features an Arduino NG, and a pair of level converters. He also added some LED-based VU meters, a couple of 7-segment displays, an LCD display, an analog voltmeter, along with plenty of I/O connectors.

The Ultimate Breadboard might look a bit daunting at first, but it seems like an awesome setup on which to do any sort of prototyping. Be sure to check out the video below for more details and to see [Claudio] give a tour of the device.

Members from the London Hackerspace recently got a little on-air time with a ping pong ball launcher. They were invited to build something for the Click show on BBC. The launcher that they built responds to hash tags on Twitter by barraging the audience with balls.

The hardware was built in two parts. The first is a dispenser that responds to incoming Tweets by releasing one ball onto a set of staging ramps. The other portion is the launcher itself. Building it like this makes it a rapid fire device, as the spinning wheels of the launcher make quick work of several dozen balls just waiting to be let loose. Check out some footage from the show after the jump.

We like this one just as much as that remote controlled launcher. We’re glad to have seen these both because we happen to have a surplus of the balls lying around since we built that clock and we’re not about to undertake some of the more dangerous ping pong based projects we’ve seen.

Have you ever seen an LED display made out of routers? [Sean] took eight Netgear routers and made an 8×4 display out of them. Because that wasn’t cool enough, a very small version of Conway’s Game of Life was added to the build.

Each router is running a copy of OpenWrt, a Linux distro meant for limited hardware. Instead of an 802.11 protocol, each router runs the B.A.T.M.A.N. advanced mesh protocol. This protocol allows each router to communicate with all the other routers.

Instead of each router receiving data from a master, the routers calculate each step in the Game of Life independently.  Once the routers communicate their initial states, each router is responsible for displaying its four LEDs for each new generation. In the video after the break, you can see [Sean]‘s routers calculating random Game of Life boards. Sadly, we didn’t notice a GoL oscillator being randomly generated, but with a 4×8 play field even a Glider wouldn’t last very long.

Simulators might have lost their cool for a lot of gamers, but [Fergo] is trying for a comeback. He built an electronic dashboard for a car racing simulator.

[Fergo] spends most of his track time on iRacing, an MMO racing simulator. Possibly due to a little bit of influence from Formula 1 steering wheels, he wanted to add to his dashboard that included Microsoft racing wheel. The dashboard includes RPM lights, a gear indicator, five general buttons, a rotary encoder, and a pit limiter, rev limiter and low fuel indicators.

The build is powered a VB.NET app that connects the iRacing API to an Arduino. To get all those buttons and LEDs talking to the Arduino, [Fergo] used an IO expander that communicates over an I2C bus. It’s a surprisingly simple design that should scale well if [Fergo] ever decides to expand his cockpit. We’re not sure if it could handle controlling a 737, but it would be more than sufficient for a Cessna 172 or Mercury capsule.

Check out [Fergo] tearing around the track with his buttonbox dashboard after the break.

In the interests of open communication in shared spaces, [dan] made a public text box that serves as a terminal to the @publictextbox twitter account. We could see something like this being useful in a hackerspace or other hang out to announce to the world the happenings of the resident makers and builders.

The software setup is very simple and can run on just about any old computer you might have lying disused in a corner. The app is built with Processing, and the code is extremely simple and easily modifiable. Even though the case is a lovely cardboard number, the Twitter Box can be dressed up as any imaginable form. We’d love to see a nice TARDIS blue, but we’ll leave that up to [dan].

You can check out the demo of the Twitter phone box after the break. Alternatively, you could re-tweet this post and take part in a load test for the @publictextbox.

When [Paul Rea] started work with his current employer, he was intrigued by a traffic light that sat unused near the entrance of the “Engineering Loft” where he was stationed. He promised himself that he would get it working one day, but several years passed before he had the chance to take a closer look at it.

He took the light home with him over Thanksgiving weekend last year, and started to dig around inside to see how things were wired up. It turns out the light was a pretty simple contraption, though he discovered it ran on mains voltage, something [Paul] didn’t really want to fiddle with. He swapped out the traffic light’s bulbs for some low-voltage models, which he could easily power with a 12v wall wart.

[Paul] then added an Arduino and PIR sensor to the light fixture in order to detect when someone was leaving the Engineering Loft, warning those who are on their way in. He says that people don’t really pay attention to the light very much, though he is pretty happy with the results.

Continue reading to see a short video of the traffic light in action.

Here are the power and driver boards that [Miceuz] designed to control a three-phase induction motor. This is his first time building such a setup and he learned a lot along the way. He admits it’s not an industrial quality driver, but it will work for motors that need 200 watts or less of power.

The motor control board uses an MC3PHAC driver IC and an IRAMS06UP60A handles the power side of things. The majority of the board design came from studying the recommended application schematics for these two parts. But that’s far from all that goes into the setup. Motor drivers always include levels of protection (the whole reason to have a driver in the first place) and that comes in several different forms. [Miceuz] made sure to add EMI, over voltage, and over current protection. He discusses all of these, sharing links that explain the concepts of each.

So you can spend a bundle on a new phone and it comes with a voice-activated digital assistant. But let’s be honest, it’s much more satisfying if you coded up this feature yourself. Here’s a guide on doing just that by combining an Asterisk server with the Wolfram Alpha API.

Asterisk is a package we are already familiar with. It’s an open source Private Branch Exchange suite that lets you build your own telephone network. Chances are, you’re not going to build one just for this project, but if you do make sure to document the process and let us know about it. With the Asterisk server in place you just need to give the assistant script an extension (in this case it’s 4747).

But then there’s the problem of translating your speech into text which can be submitted as a Wolfram query. There’s an API for that too which uses Google to do that translation. From there you can tweak abbreviations and other parameters, but all-in-all your new assistant is ready to go. Call it up and ask what to do when you have a flat tire (yeah, that commercial drives us crazy too).

[Thanks M]

Even though giant multouch display tables have been around for a few years now we have yet to see them being used in the wild. While the barrier to entry for a Microsoft Surface is very high, one of the biggest problems in implementing a touch table is one of interaction; how exactly should the display interpret multiple commands from multiple users? [Stephan], [Christian], and [Patrick] came up with an interesting solution to sorting out who is touching where by having a computer look at shoes.

The system uses a Kinect mounted on the edge of a table to extract users from the depth images. From there, interaction on the display can be pinned to a specific user based on hand and arm orientation. As an added bonus the computer can also recognize users from their shoes. If a user is wearing a pair of shoes the computer recognizes, they’ll just walk up to the table and the software will recognize them.

For the lazy man who can’t be bothered to buy a proper wattage lamp here’s the Clever Clapper, a Clapper that finally has the ability to dim the lights.

Like the clapper we saw last month, [Pete]‘s version uses an ATtiny2313 and an electret mic. What sets [Pete]‘s version apart from the vintage 80s model is the ability to dim the lights. Like any clapper, two hand claps within a second toggles the relay. Clapping three times within one second puts the lamp into fading mode. In this mode, the lights dim up and down with PWM until a fourth clap is detected.

[Pete] saw that the program memory in his ATtiny2313 wasn’t 100% full, so he added a few more capabilities. If you shine a laser onto his circuit, a relay trips and turns on a decorative moon lamp. There’s also a ‘lecture mode’ that feeds the microphone directly into the microcontroller to vary the PWM signal. The result is a light that brightens with more intense sound. Check that feature out after the break after the demo video of [Pete]‘s Clever Clapper.

[miceuz] has a friend that works as a theatre technician, and in the course of his job he often needs to jigger with various stage components while shows are in progress. As you can imagine, the lighting situation is far from ideal, so he asked [miceuz] to build him an adjustable lighting solution for his tool box.

The circuit itself is relatively straightforward, using an ATMega88 to provide the PWM required for dimming and color control. Input is taken from three different sources, a rotary encoder for color selection, a pot for brightness control, and a button to turn the light strip on and off.

[miceuz] says that while project came together pretty easily, it still presented some issues along the way which provide some useful design reminders for beginners (and some veterans) alike.

First and foremost: debounce, debounce, debounce. [miceuz] forgot this mantra and made a mad dash to add capacitors to his design after etching the PCB to ensure that his inputs were not bouncing all over the place. He also noted that one should always be sure to read the ADCL before the ADCH register when decoding ADC data. His final observation is that using thick traces is the best policy whenever possible – he ran into a lot of issues with traces detaching during assembly, which he had to rework with wire and solder.

In the end, his friend was happy with the result, and [miceuz] is a better hacker for having worked through his issues. What sorts of important/useful lessons have you learned through the course of your projects? Be sure to share them with us in the comments.

[Ishan Karve] works in some bizarro world where the building management demands that all servers and Uninterruptible Power Supplies be shut down at the end of each evening. While inconceivable to most systems admins, he has no recourse but to comply. This means that his employees need to turn things off before they leave for the day, and since they often work up to 15 hours a day, waiting for Windows server to shut down seems like an eternity.

Being the good manager he is, [Ishan] decided to build a device that handles the clean shutdown of their servers and UPS for them. An Arduino board serves as the brains of the device, communicating with and issuing shutdown commands to the UPS over a serial port. The Arduino is also connected to the office network, enabling it to send ARP requests to the servers in order to determine when they have completely shut down for the day. In order to protect against an accidental shutdown due to network connectivity issues, [Ishan] added an RTC module to the mix so that the Arduino does not issue shutdown commands until at least 8 pm.

Instead of waiting around for Windows to do its thing, [Ishan’s] employees can take off once they start the server shutdown process, knowing that they are totally compliant with their landlord’s crazy requests.

There’s really nothing special about this hack. [Craig Hollabaugh] needed an Arduino shield for hosting a Pololu motor driver and making connections to external hardware. What really caused us to spend way too much time reviewing his posts is that [Craig's] narrative style of documenting the project is delightful, and we’re envious of his electronics lab. That link points to the first of four project pages. The next page is linked at the bottom of each page, or you can find the collection after the break.

[Craig] starts by designing a single-sided shield in Eagle. It’s been years since he made his own PCB, and it takes him about four tries to get the toner transfer right (we’ve also been victim to the wrong mirroring of the resist!). When it comes time to drill for the pin headers [Craig] uses his 3D printer to make a bracket allowing the Dremel to mount to the drill press. There’s a good tip here about buying carbide bits from Harbor Freight; we thought eBay was the only place to get these. Many of us would need to put in a parts order, but this workshop has a well-organized stock of everything he needs. He also has the solder paste and PID outfitted toaster oven to reflow the board. Oh, and when he forgets to add a resistor it’s off the rework station to add one.

See what we mean… one can never have too many tools.

• Project Page 1
• Project Page 2
• Project Page 3
• Project Page 4

[Roel] had read that people won the DARPA shredder challenge, but that their technology was kept a secret, interested in this concept he also remembered an episode of the X-Files where they had reconstructed shredded paper using a computer system. Unlike most computer based TV show BS this did not seem to be too far fetched so he went about trying it himself.

First a note is written, and then cut up into strips, the strips are then scanned into a computer where the magic happens. Next each strip outlined in polygons and then the software is to follow the polygon outline looking for a change in color at the pixel level. The software then goes into a pattern matching mode and reassembles the paper based on a scoring system.

While not many people use old fashioned strip shredders anymore, the basic idea works and if you really wanted to expand it could be applied to cross cut or particle shredders.

[Mike] picked up a cheap USB hub for four pounds (about $6) including delivery. He wanted to know how it’s possible to get quality electronics for that price, and as you may have guessed it’s not possible. He cracked open the power supply that shipped with the hub and hooked it up for some testing.

The wall wart has a sticker on it that claims a rating of 1 Amp at 5 volts. It’s pretty easy to see that this hardware cannot meet that spec just by looking at the circuit board. It’s a low-end single sided board that has some really disappointing isolation between the mains and regulated side of the circuit. As far as we can tell there’s really no reliable regulation circuit on the low side of the transformer, and the tests that [Mike] runs in the clip after the break show this. From left to right in the picture above you can see voltage at the hub-side of the power cord, current on the load, and voltage leaving the circuit board. At just 560 mA the voltage the USB hub is receiving has fallen below 3 volts!

The link to this project was sent in by [Paul] after reading about that fake Canon camera PSU. We love this kind of stuff so keep the tips coming as you find them!