Fresh hacks every day
This role reversal is quite entertaining. While the game Angry Birds is a virtual realization of knocking over stuff with a sling-shot, Super Angry Birds adds a physical control element back to the virtual game. It’s silly, but well-executed. The main controller takes advantage a part which we don’t see used very often. It’s a motorized linear actuator which … Read the rest
[Will Finucane] of Revolt Labs/Mad Science Blog was looking for a way to keep his cats happily fed while away on a short vacation, so he put together a cheap and easy automatic feeder to ensure that his pets didn’t go hungry while he was away.
We’ve seen different iterations of automatic pet feeders here before, some relying on rotating … Read the rest
What do you get when you cross a glue stick with a hobby servo motor? A linear actuator, of course! Although this could be done with other household implements, the form factor of this glue stick seems perfectly suited to sit on top of a servo horn.
The servo, as you might have guessed, has to be converted to … Read the rest
[Raul] built a cheap linear actuator out of a drawer slide and a surplus flatbed scanner.
A few builds we’ve seen, like the PCB drill press or the horribly inefficient thermostat, used linear actuators as key components of their builds. These linear actuators are fairly expensive compared to other parts we usually have lying around so going the homebrew … Read the rest
Sometimes, changing one little bit of a green hack turns it into a build that wastes as much energy as our gaming rig. [Dr. West]‘s automatic window controller is one of these builds. The good news is the window controller can be easily modified to cut energy costs in the fall and spring.
[Dr. West] doesn’t have any control over … Read the rest
[Ed Rogers] has the unfortunate privilege of living right next to a set of train tracks, and as a man who holds his sleep in high regard, he needed to find a way to keep the noise in his bedroom to a minimum. To combat the sound of passing trains, he built himself a system that automatically closes his windows … Read the rest
[AntonB] has modified a servo into a powerful linear actuator (think: changing rotational motion into linear motion). The process is simple enough, modify a servo for continuous rotation and then add the custom built actuating shaft. You do of course lose the precision of the servo, but a small price to pay to be able to lift ~20 pounds straight … Read the rest
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