Children of the 80s may remember the Big Trak, a six-wheeled programmable toy designed to explore distant planets on the other side of the living room and the vast expanse of a two-car garage. The Big Trak was re-released a few years ago and [Nathan] took quite a shine to this improved version. He was so enthralled he decided to upgrade it even more to support the LOGO programming language.

The 30-year-old version of the Big Trak had a membrane keypad where commands such as ‘drive forward 5 units’ and ‘turn 90 degrees’ can be saved and run from memory. This is very similar to the LOGO programming language with and turtle graphics and nearly identical to the Roamer LOGO robot.

To control the Big Trak, [Nathan] upgraded the electronics to a ChipKit Uno and a BeagleBone. A LOGO interpreter written in Python and uploaded to the BeagleBone. After this, [Nathan] was nearly set. He did add a WiFi interface to control his Big Trak wirelessly, a nice touch we think.

You can check out [Nathan]‘s twenty-minute build video where he goes through the entire process of upgrading his Big Trak after the break.

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After writing this post on somone hacking QR codes, Hack A Day commenters came out in full force posting some really cool links about modifying QR codes to include a logo. I’ll fully admit I geeked out a little, but in the process I figured out some of the theory behind embedding logos in QR codes.

After getting my hands on the ISO 18004 specification for QR codes, I decided to try embedding the Hack A Day skull & wrenches inside a QR code. The tools I used were Photoshop, this QR code generator, and Microsoft Paint (I’ve never seen a program to edit individual pixels that has a better UI, so don’t laugh).

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The Open Source Hardware (OSHW) initiative is rolling right along. But now it’s time for you to share your input. The movement is choosing a logo and you get to decide which one it will be. The ten finalists shown above were narrowed down from the 129 submissions received during the public call for logos. The thought is that any time you have a new project which fits the OSHW definition you can slap this on the project page, or silk screen it right on the PCB (although OSHW applies to more than just electronic projects). A picture says a thousand  words you know.

Voting ends April 5.

[via Evil Mad Scientist]

Happy Halloween to one and all. Let’s celebrate the holiday with some related links.

[Brandon] carved the Hackaday logo into his Jack-’o-Lantern. But that’s not all, inspired by EMSL’s Jack-’o-Lantern, as well as our own offering, he added LEDs. Three of them occupy the flesh behind the eyes and nose, fading in and out thanks to some pulse-width modulation that an Arduino provides.

Mad Scientist Blinken Costume

[Bill Porter] is getting down with the LEDs by making a Mad Scientist costume. The accent jewelry is an LED matrix necklace that he made himself to go along with 76 of them sewn into the coat. Also joining the party is over one hundred feet of wire and two Arduinos.

Dole Out Candy Via Twitter/Phone

Apparently [Noel Portugal] will be too busy hacking together his next project to dish out candy on Halloween. To make up for his double-booked schedule he built an automated candy dispenser. Just tweet your request and the bucket will open a hatch from which candy will fall. There’s also an option to activate it with a voice call, or just slap that red button until your blood sugar reaches an adequate level.

Star Wars Pumpkins

[Charles Gantt] carved Yoda’s mug into his pumpkin and backlit it with green LEDs. Someone else paired two together for a Death Star shoots Alderon scene [via Reddit]. If those aren’t enough for you there’s a Star Wars top 10 collection out there somewhere.

Now go start working on next year’s props!

The Hack a Day store is still going strong. We’re really enjoying the fact that when you buy a Hack a Day item, it was made by one of us. We hope we can keep this up. It makes our merchandise mean so much more, we think.

We’ve  been getting tons of requests for other colors of stickers as well as other products. Other colors of stickers is easy enough, we now have black, white, both gloss and matte, light grey, and just starting today, glow in the dark.  We’ll be updating the store as we run out, or buy new colors.  We only have a little bit of the glow in the dark right now, so if you don’t want to have to wait for more to come in, you better place your order quick.

We have also received a steady flow of requests for T-shirts. Unfortunately, we just don’t have all of the equipment yet. So, we’ll begin taking pre-orders for t-shirts today. As soon as we have roughly 30 pre-orders, we should be able to start making the shirts. To begin with, we’ll be doing white logo on black shirts. There’s also a Custom shirt option that gets your name placed on the front of the shirt as well, though that does come at some additional cost. Maybe after he gets all the kinks worked out, [Jakob] will grace us with shirts to sell as well.

There is also a product that has been the source of a lot of discussion between the staff. A new logo, designed by [Caleb]. You can see it above. Some feel that we should adopt it as our new logo, since the old one is kind of a generic biker symbol. The new one reflects a little more what we do.  [Phillip Torrone], the founder of Hack a Day and designer of the old one likes it and says ” love it … i say go for it – evolve or die :)”.  What do you guys think? Even if it never becomes the site logo, it will be for sale in the store.

[update: Judging by the feedback, we'll be sticking with our original logo. Custom designs will be available in the store though. Email me directly(caleb@hackaday.com) to discuss getting your design on there. ]

[Eddie], who made the Mac Logo LCD Mod, had posted a step by step tutorial on how to do it yourself. He basically just fully disassembled his MacBook, popped out the logo, put one from an iBook or Powerbook, then mounted a small LCD back there and routed it into a USB port internally. He says the extra electronics cause a tiny bulge in the monitor casing. We wonder if this couldn’t lead to stress damage on the main LCD in the long run.

[thanks Koray]