Your hamster lives to good life, with food delivery and a maid service that cleans up after him. [DanF] helped to brighten up this hamster’s life even more by improving its exercise equipment and giving it a small night-light as well. This project adds a low RPM alternator to the hamster wheel.

The first part of the process was to reduce energy lost to friction by fitting the wheel with a bearing. From there a ring of permanent magnets was added which will pass by a stationary coil and induce a current. It works, but unfortunately there’s not enough power generated to charge a battery. That means the light is only on when the hamster is running. But maybe you can figure out a way to use a super-capacitor like we saw in that exercise bike hack.

One nice finishing touch to the setup is a bicycle computer to track how much time was sent on the wheel, and the distance traveled.

[Thanks Dizzy]

[Jacob] sent in his teams final project, Project 413. While sounding like something straight out of an action movie, don’t worry, it’s not the next terminator. Rather a combination of an eBox (in place of an EEE pc), omni wheels, motors, batteries, and the finishing touch – a hamster ferret ball. If this is sounding familiar to a certain web comic, then right you are, as XKCD was their main inspiration. Sadly, the web cam and ‘having a soul’ functions didn’t make it into their version, but being controlled via Wii remote is always a plus.  Check out a video after the break.

We had a lot of entries for our Fail contest; there can only be one winner though. We liked [Gordon LaPlante]‘s entry pictured above most of all. It’s big, it’s broken, and it’s black and white; that certainly sounds like us. [Gordon] wins $100 worth of No Starch Press merchandise.

There were plenty of other honorable entries. You can view them in the Hack a Day Flickr photo pool. We saw a couple themes emerge during the contest and have highlighted some of them after the break.

Hamsters

This caught us off guard. Our downtime message said, “we’re adding more hamsters to our server power plant” and people just ran away with it.

[hohan]

This one by [jetblackscreems] looks like it has lots of mascot potential, spelling be damned.

Fail Whales

These were natural given our Twitter inspiration.

[oneamericankid]

[Bjonnh]

[reenigneesrever]

[macetech] made probably the most Hack a Day appropriate rendition of the Twitter image.

Error screens

[jonathanrice78]

[AdamsGrizzly]

[dibbqwaz] made a fine ASCII 503 that should probably be in the previous category.

[adamsih300u]

Angry robots

We’re sad this didn’t gain more traction.

[enrique jimenez]

[einsofayin]

This was a really fun contest to hold and we’ll be having many more in the future. Check out our Hack a Day T-Shirt design contest, which ends this weekend.