[Patrick] decided to make a computer controlled etch-a-sketch. While the idea is not that new, there is always a different way to accomplish a goal. An Arduino is used to control a pair of stepper motors which were sourced for pretty cheap, and even came with their own driver. Next a stand was mocked up using foam board, which helps determine where all the parts should live.

Next was a way to attach the steppers to the knobs, gears would be used and a collet meant for model airplanes was sourced to make the mechanical connection between gear and shaft. With everything set in place via foam board and paper printouts, it is off to get some thin plywood. The plywood is sent though a laser cutter creating most of the stand and gears. Now its all software, a program was whipped up for OSX which converts low res pictures into squiggly lines perfect for the etch-a-sketch to draw on its screen.

The results are quite impressive, join us after the break for a quick video.

[Andrew] and his brother had some time (and a lot of ping pong balls) on their hands, so they decided to have some fun and built a remote-controlled ping pong ball turret.

Arduino aside, the turret is cheap and easy to build as [Andrew’s] writeup explains. The firing mechanism was constructed using a pair of foam wheels and motors, which is used to launch the ping pong balls much like a baseball pitching machine. The balls are stored above the wheels in a cardboard tube and released by a mechanical flap when triggered.

When [Andrew] is ready to release the turret’s payload, he sends a command to his computer over VNC, which relays the command to the Arduino over a serial connection, triggering the flap. While the control scheme could certainly benefit from direct, wireless phone-to-Arduino communications, it seems to work well enough for [Andrew's] needs.

Check out the video dramatization below to see [Andrew] “surprise” his brother with a hail of ping pong balls after the jump.

Children of the 80s may remember the Big Trak, a six-wheeled programmable toy designed to explore distant planets on the other side of the living room and the vast expanse of a two-car garage. The Big Trak was re-released a few years ago and [Nathan] took quite a shine to this improved version. He was so enthralled he decided to upgrade it even more to support the LOGO programming language.

The 30-year-old version of the Big Trak had a membrane keypad where commands such as ‘drive forward 5 units’ and ‘turn 90 degrees’ can be saved and run from memory. This is very similar to the LOGO programming language with and turtle graphics and nearly identical to the Roamer LOGO robot.

To control the Big Trak, [Nathan] upgraded the electronics to a ChipKit Uno and a BeagleBone. A LOGO interpreter written in Python and uploaded to the BeagleBone. After this, [Nathan] was nearly set. He did add a WiFi interface to control his Big Trak wirelessly, a nice touch we think.

You can check out [Nathan]‘s twenty-minute build video where he goes through the entire process of upgrading his Big Trak after the break.

Little, no name, 1.5 inch LCD photo key-chains are all over the place for practically nothing. Not too surprisingly these things do not vary much in the parts that they use, some flash ram, a little lipo battery and a 16 bit color LCD. Wanting to find a way to reuse that LCD [Simon] Has an excellent tutorial on how to reuse a FTM144D01N LCD with a ILITEK ILI9163 LCD driver for your electronic projects.

Two units were used, one was ripped apart and soldered to a home made breakout board, the other was kept intact so its logic could be sniffed out with an oscilloscope. A pin-out was quickly determined since these things typically use a 8 or 16 bit data bus. Then a driver library was put together for AVR micro controllers, which includes some basic shape drawing and a 5×8 font.

While you may not be lucky enough to get this exact LCD screen from your local bargain store, there are a lot of pointers in here to hopefully get you up and going. We will be trying our luck on a very similar screen this afternoon as these things do have a decent picture and fairly quick response times already packaged in a hand-held case.

Join us after the break for a quick video.

The Syma S107 IR is a popular little remote controlled helicopter. When a friend of [Michael]‘s started flying one around the office he decided to try and jam the signal, creating a no fly zone. Luckily some people on the internet have already decoded the IR signals used by the flying menace. From there, a quick browsing of Mouser to source some LEDs, and to whip up some code for a TI MSP430 was all that was left.

The software on the micro controller is set to broadcast a “thrust off” signal, but [Michael] admits he is not 100% sure if the helicopter is actually receiving that, or if the signal from the no fly zone is mixing with the remote’s signal, causing garbage to be received. Either way when the helicopter gets in range of the no fly zone pad it drops from the air.

Things didn’t go perfectly though, overestimating the current capabilities of the MSP was causing the micro controller to reset and crash the debugger. But a simple rearrangement of how the signals are sent quickly solved this problem.

Join us after the break for a quick video.

How many of you have started playing Jenga, and thought, “If only I had a pistol that would punch the blocks out violently for me, that would be much more fun?” Your presumed request has been answered with the [Jenga Pistol 2]! There is also the [Jenga Pistol 1], which would be impressive if the second one wasn’t already made and functioning! There’s a great video of the second one working after the break, so be sure to check that out!

The pistol works by hurling a bolt forward using a rubber band for power.  This bolt can then be pulled back, and the clever trigger mechanism automatically locks it in place for another shot.  This mechanism by itself could serve as inspiration for any number of other pistol-powered hacks. As for the entire project, [Matthias] gives lots of excellent pictures of his work in the post that will let you understand the concept.  For well-written plans though, you’ll have to cough up a very reasonable $6. You’ll also need a reasonably well equipped wood shop if you want to make one which is rather more expensive.

If you’re like us, you’ve been infatuated with the small RC helicopter you picked up on Amazon up until the point where it careened off a wall and broke its blades. Now that you’re wondering about what to do with that small pile of plastic, metal, and electronics, why not print some helicopter blades on your 3D printer?

[Taylor] printed these blades on his Utilimaker, but we don’t see why they couldn’t be printed on a Makerbot or other RepRap. The first set of printed blades worked on the top rotor, but they were too heavy when all four blades were replace. The parts were edited in netfabb using a 0.08mm layer height and now they’re working perfectly. As far as free tools go, Slic3r is the new hotness for .STL to Gcode conversion and now that [Taylor] put the files up on Thingiverse, anyone can print a set of spare blades.

Check out [Taylor] comparing his printed blades to the stock ones that came with his awesome heli after the break.

[George] is a Neo Geo aficionado, and among his collection of paraphernalia, he has a MVS-Mini game console. His mini “Multi Video System” is a 2-slot model, meaning that it can hold two game cartridges at a time, which are indicated by plastic cards inserted in the cabinet’s face plate. Instead of swapping those cards out each time he changed cartridges, he thought it would be far cooler to install digital displays instead.

He scoured just about every retail store he could before finding a handful of small 5” digital picture frames that looked to fit the bill. After some careful cabinet modifications he had them wired up and ready for display. The frames don’t hold a ton of pictures, but they do support the use of SD cards. [George] says that he’ll likely just buy a ton of small SD cards, swapping them out whenever he changes games, though over time that might become as tedious as swapping out the plastic cards.

We would love to see [George] take his new digital display up a level, so be sure to share your ideas in the comments. Perhaps we can persuade him to automate things a bit.

[Johan] really got himself out of a bind with this one.

After his son started playing AppMates, he desperately wanted the requisite figures to complete the experience. AppMates is an iPad game where a child drives a small plastic car around a virtual environment displayed on the touchscreen. Unfortunately for [Johan]‘s son, the officially licensed Cars characters would take at least three months to make it to his home in Sweden. [Johan] did the next best thing and made his own.

[Johan] took a pair of Cars Pez dispensers and took off the figure. The bottom of the character was covered with a bit of plastic from the base of the Pez dispenser and a little bit of conductive foam and was added to the body. Now [Johan]‘s son can drive his toys around Radiator Springs just like he could with the official figurines. There’s also the aspect of not making a child wait months for a bit of plastic, so we’ll call this one a win for [Johan].

[Will] from RevoltLab wrote in to share part one of a cool project he is working on right now, a remote-controlled mobile rocket launcher. Before you run off and call the Department of Homeland Security, he says that the launcher will be used for personal hobby rockets, which are typically considered mostly harmless.

The first part of the build is mostly concerned with obtaining a Power Wheels car and tweaking it to be driven remotely. After stripping out most of the odds and ends out of a Barbie Jeep he found via Craigslist, he added a small hobby servo under the dashboard to actuate the pedal. A larger (and much more expensive) servo was attached to the Jeep’s steering bar, allowing [Will] to easily turn the wheels with the flick of a switch.

With the mechanical bits out of the way, he installed an R/C receiver and took to the streets lawn with his creation.

The car seems to handle pretty well, and although the price of the components quickly start to add up, we’d be more than happy to spend that kind of cash for an R/C car that size!

Continue reading to watch a short video of the Jeep in action, and be sure to check Revolt Labs’ site often to follow [Will's] progress.

[Jeff] and his wife put together a firefighter themed birthday celebration for their son. As he’s not entirely handy in the kitchen, [Jeff] decided not to lend a hand with the baking or cake decorating. But he didn’t forego the opportunity to combine a couple of different projects to make a Matchbox car launcher that responds to emergency band radio.

Since he’s an amateur radio enthusiast he already had a scanner to monitor the air waves. Apparently there’s a band just for relaying dispatch messages to emergency vehicles. He set the radio equipment to only monitor that channel. An Arduino was added to the mix, taking measurements of the voltage level on the scanner’s audio output. When it’s driven high enough the Arduino trips the toy car launcher.

The car launcher itself is a pretty nifty setup. There are five chutes at the top of a ramp that each fit a car. A sliding gate holds them in place, but can be removed one slot at a time by a geared motor. The addition of a poster board facade and two flashing red LEDs makes the setup look right at home with the other party decorations.

See a call come into the station in the clip after the break. We don’t have a category called “fun parenting” so “toy hacks” will have to do.

[Alex] was digging through his closet and came upon an old PS2 game pad for Dance Dance Revolution. He hated the idea of throwing it out just slightly more than the idea of playing DDR again, so he decided to find a way to reuse it.

He was a big fan of the game Simon (aka Genius) as a kid and thought that the DDR pad would make a novel interface for the classic game. Using the PS2XLib by [Bill Porter], which allows an Arduino to easily communicate with a PS2 controller, [Alex] put his Simon replica together in no time flat.

He painted an empty ice cream container with the classic Simon colors, installing a small LED under each quadrant, then wrote the game’s code.

As you can see in the video below, his version of the game works nicely, and forces you to actually get up and move a bit, which we like.

[Chris] has been hard at work building his own version of Simon called [Nomis]. Although [HAD] has featured an ATiny Simon clone before, the article does an excellent job explaining how the system works.

The ATTiny85 is used to control this game, which, for now is laid out on a simple breadboard. A PCB version of this game has been ordered from [Seeed], so be sure to check back to see the results of this forthcoming upgrade. It’s really cool that this kind of small scale manufacturing is available to the masses.

A parts list is provided as well as a code overview and schematic. To see it in action, check out the video after the break. There’s an explanation at the beginning, but skip to 1:55 if you’d rather just see the machine in action. The game can reportedly run until a 100 “move” limit is reached. This was arbitrary, but it should be enough for most people!

[Thomas Renck] recently picked up a 1000mW wireless video transmitter that he ultimately planned to mount in an RC plane. Before he strapped it on a plane to potentially kiss it goodbye for good, he wanted to play with it a while to see what it was capable of.

After a friend helped him determine the camera’s maximum range (about 1900 feet on open ground), he thought it would be fun to strap it on his nitro R/C truck. That didn’t work out so well due to some vibration issues, so he constructed a makeshift R/C car from the shipping box the camera arrived in, along with some other odds and ends.

As you can see in the video below, the propeller-driven “Boxmobile” zips along quite nicely. The video feed from the camera is pretty impressive too, allowing him to easily guide the car while it’s well out of sight.

At nearly $350, the self-proclaimed “ghetto-bot” is certainly not cheap, though we hear body repairs are a piece of cake!

Tweet Receiving, that is. This Ewok model, named “Ewen the Cheerlight,” is able to rotate its head left and right as well as show expressions. The most interesting feature of this hack, however, is that the little Ewok actually wakes up each time one tweets a “colour” to @cheerlights and lets it’s owner [Joel] know what he thinks of the “color” you’ve chosen. [Joel] insists that he’s like this featured on [HAD], although it remains to be seen if it will soon be turned off after the tweets start rolling in…

As far as how the device works, the head is turned with a simple hobby servo motor, and the expressions are shown on a LED matrix. The model itself is built from a polystyrene ball and an old table lamp. The build really looks awesome.

All of this is controlled by an Easy USB Interface Board which is listed on [Pozible], the Australian version of [Kickstarter]. Be sure to check out the video of “Ewen” in action after the break!