Aw, isn’t he cute? Looks are deceiving, because if you get him started, this duck says some vulgar things. [Gigavolt] found the little guy abandoned at the Goodwill store and decided it might have some hacking potential. Boy was he right. The stock toy can already sing a tune while flapping its beak and wings. After spending some time in [Gigavolt's] lair, this duck is going to be on the naughty list. The best part is that this is going to end up in the hands of someone else thanks to a Secret Santa exchange.

The build article linked above is safe for you to read at work, but the video embedded after the break most certainly is not. [Gigavolt] got to work replacing the integrated circuit inside with his own PIC 16F628 microcontroller. He uses a new audio track, which is played back by a SOMO-14D audio player board. The two use different input voltage levels which is something of a bother, but it’s a standby power drain that has been vexing [Gigavolt] he rolled his own board using the DorkbotPDX order and can’t figure out why the current consumption is so high. Take a look at the cursing duck, then see if you can’t troubleshoot his electrical issues.

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Here’s a PIC based frequency counter that outputs the count via an RS232 serial connection. [Oakkar7] tipped us off about it after seeing the AVR based counter we featured yesterday. This project is a bit older and a bit dirtier.

Inside the metal DB9 housing you’ll find just seven parts. The most important is a PIC 16F628 which handles both the counting and the serial communications. We’re not quite sure how it’s managing to talk to that USB-to-Serial converter without some type of level conversion. Since this microcontroller is not a dedicated counter chip a little bit of trimming must be done to bring the accuracy into spec. There’s also some physical trimming involved. In order to get everything to fit into the small enclosure the circuit was free-formed without a PCB or protoboard and the case of the DIP chip had to be ground down just a bit. As for the readout, a simple script can grab the data and display it in a terminal.

[via Piclist]

This collection of model vehicle hacks adds obstacle avoidance in an attempt to make them autonomous. At the front end you’ll find two PCBs which use IR approximation to monitor the road ahead. We’re not familiar with this particular use of these IR receivers (TSOP1738) which we’re used to seeing in remote control receiver applications but if recent posts are any indication we think you’ll enjoy the use of a 555 timer on each of those boards.

The rest of the hardware is pretty common, a PIC 16F628 does the thinking while an L293D h-bridge drives the motors. Alas, we didn’t find a video, or even a description of the finished project. But there are full schematics, board layout pictures, and the code for both this vehicle and a second Tank version.

[Thanks Pieter]

What we need in today’s handhelds is LESS resolution. Take a look at the video after the break to see the exciting action that [Bruno Pasquini] 4×4 LED matrix handheld game delivers. The device is made up of 16 bi-color LEDs, four buttons, and a PIC 16F628. There’s no schematic yet but it looks like there’s no need for shift registers, just some transistors to handle the current load for the rows of each color. We’ve seen a 64-pixel handheld that plays Super Mario Brothers, but this portable brings a top scrolling racing game with just 25% of that display size.

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[Andrew] built a light box for an exhibition last year that displayed different colors statically. After showing it off, it went unchanged but future improvements remained in the back of his mind. Recently, he pulled it out again and hacked together a controller to drive the colors individually.

He’s actually reusing some of the hardware he built for a different project. At its core is a PIC 16F628 that actuates the lights using relays. In this case, only four of the eight on the board are used to control red, white, blue, and green cold cathode tubes. The video after the break shows the device randomly rotating through different patterns. This is a nice start to making the piece more interactive and we can image adding web-controlled color changes, or perhaps some Daft Punk inspired functionality.

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