Hone your skills by building control modules

If you ask us, there’s no substitute for learning by doing. But often the hardest part of acquiring new skills is coming up with the idea for a project that utilizes them. [Mike Rankin] wanted to develop a project using laser cut acrylic, and settled on building a control box for an RGB LED strip. He got some practice … Read the rest

Nixie tubes live in a cool box

This set of four Nixie tubes display the number of people following bildr on Twitter. That’s neat; it uses an Arduino and some open source driver boards. But what caught out eye is the enclosure. The image above shows only half, but when assembled it’s a nice little cube that keeps the insides safe. This was laser cut using the … Read the rest

Hackaday links: August 15, 2010

Creepy or not?

Do you find these faces creepy or cute? They can display a huge range of facial gestures and the German engineers who designed them were trying to avoid the uncanny valley. That’s the point at which human features on a robot seem quite real, but are off in just the right way as to cause revulsion. … Read the rest

Laser cut drum kit

drums

[Segwaymonkey] picked up an arduino based drumkit circuit and needed a kit to place it on. He worked up a pretty cool design and had it laser cut out of acrylic. The cool part of the design is how he delt with the head motion of the drum. Each head has 4 “springs” that were also cut from the … Read the rest

Folding hexapod bodies

SideBySide (Custom)

At Berkeley, they’re coming up with new ways to make their itty bitty hexapods. These are basically tiny flatpacked bodies cut from cardboard. The end goal is to not only make them smaller and faster to build, but to reduce the friction in the joints.  You can download the files on their site as well as download movies of … Read the rest

Ponoko launches subscription manufacturing

reprap

Ponoko is an on-demand manufacturing service. You submit your design and they’ll cut it out of one of their many materials. The site is built so you can sell your products or designs directly. They recently took a major step with the introduction of Designmake Prime. It’s a monthly subscription based service with many benefits. It lets … Read the rest

Simple servo bot plans

had_arduino_servo

oomlout has posted some interesting plans for a simple robot. It’s based around an Arduino and is a platform similar to the Parallax Boe-Bot. The Arduino sends PWM signals to continuos rotation servos that drive the two main wheels. All of the structural components are laser cut from acrylic with slots to hold standard hex nuts. It’s an … Read the rest