Hack a Day » borg

Halloween Props: Borg costume

Mike Szczys — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 19:00:55 +0000

The Halloween hacks are rolling in late this year, but we’re delighted to see that [DJ Sures] finished his borg costume in time. It is made up of a hodge-podge of items from different cultures… oh wait, so are the borg. These include a set of hockey pads spray painted black with just a light misting of silver to give them some depth. After taking the image above (which mostly shows off his makeup) [DJ Sures] added an LCD screen to the chest plate and lighted electronics throughout. See for yourself after the break.

If you liked this you might take a look at his singing spark plug.

Filed under: home hacks

Balancing cube looks more like a star

Mike Szczys — Wed, 19 May 2010 21:00:15 +0000

This art-meets-robot has the grueling task of standing on one foot all day long while other robots get to bend to their heart’s content. It balances on that single point by adjusting its center of gravity with six pendulum-like appendages. To make the system more like the Borg, each of those six modules shares sensor data with the rest and work together to keep the unit upright. Give in to loving the design because resistance is futile.

[Via BotJunkie]

Filed under: robots hacks

Ben Heck’s six axis 360 controller

Will O'Brien — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 22:21:00 +0000

This is not the most difficult mod ever, but digg loved it enough to kill Ben’s site before I could post it yesterday. Ben’s been doing a slate of consignment mods lately. This time he stuffed the guts of a PS3 six axis controller into an Xbox 360 controller body. Ben’s starting to act like a XBox 360 borg… His site is back up for now, but it’s awaiting some dns updates as it moves to a sexier hosting plan. Look while you can.

Hack a Day goes autonomous

Eliot — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 11:00:00 +0000

After declaring our independence last fall, complete site autonomy seemed like the next logical step. Using some clever coding we have developed a system that will let Hack a Day run without any intervention. The first layer in this system is topic selection. All tip line submissions are sent through a series of filters. These look for keywords like “firmware”, “POV”, “microcontroller”, “video”, “linux”, “WRT”, “GPS”, “PCB”, “TLA”. Each submission is given a l33tness ranking based on these words and the best tip is immediately thrown away. The second highest link is then passed through our advanced anti-duping engine that confirms the link hasn’t been posted in the last week. The post text is generated using Markov chains in what top scientists suspect is a miracle. The story is then automatically cut and pasted into Digg without credit. To foster discussion the reader comments are automatically seeded with “first post” and “this is not a hack” on every post. This system is implemented using a large quantity of duct tape (code and literal) on our brand new Linksys WRT54G beowulf cluster. We hope this system serves you well. We’ve been working on an “auto-hacking robot” to generate how-tos as well, but on its test run it instinctively disassembled itself.