Hackaday Links: November 10, 2011

Experimentations with haptics

[Chris] sent in two videos (1, 2) documenting his experiments with haptic feedback. He’s recording the position of a DC motor and can either play it back or send it to another motor. It’s very similar to the kissing robot we saw earlier this year, but we’re not making any judgments.

Mobile Emergency Repeater go bag

[Nick], a.k.a. [KF5JAK] sent in a few pics of his emergency/disaster relief amateur radio go bag. With a 3G connection via a cell phone, the MER can be used with EchoLink.

Launchpad MIDI booster pack

Earlier this month we lamented the dearth of add-ons for the TI Launchpad. The folks on the 43oh forums just came out with a MIDI booster pack. Time to dust off that old Radio Shack keyboard, we guess.

Macro photography with OH GOD WHARGARBL

You know camera lenses work both ways, right? [Karl] has been experimenting with this very idea by mounting a camera lens backwards and running a few wires so it’s electrically connected as well. Check out an example shot.

Keeping tabs on your kids’ homework

[Janis] doesn’t live with his kids but he wanted to keep track of their homework. He set up a document scanner that sends those worksheets straight to his email inbox. All he has to do is annotate them and send them back. This guy’s doing it right.

Using Your Existing Hardware To Automate Scanning And Filing

This one must have been fun to come up with because it’s got it all. There’s hardware, firmware, networking, and server scripts all working together to create a filing, scanning document center for your business. The best part is that [Janis Jakaitis] was tasked to do this as part of his job (we’re sure there’s a bunch of IT guys shaking their heads at this statement, but it sounds like fun to us!).

The goal was to use an existing document scanner to create PDFs which are then stored in a filing system on the network. Of course it needed to be automatic. The first big issue was that the scanner was USB only, and when connected to a USB-to-LAN bridge the buttons on the device no longer functioned. [Janis] put together an Arduino circuit that added that button, as well as a display to show the status of your scan job.

The next issue is getting the filing system to recognize the document as a unique file. The solution here is to generate a unique barcode label that can be affixed to the page before scanning. Since this is a standalone setup, it was tricky to get the label printer to spit out a unique label. He already had the Arduino working with the scanner, so [Janis] decided to use it to drive this barcode job as well. It calls to a Lua script running on the server, which then pushes the next unique code to the printer.

Tie it all together and you get the demo video after the break.

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