Your theme song greets you at the front door

One thing you can look forward to when arriving at home after a long, arduous day at the office is some peppy theme music when you walk in the door. [Sebastian Sommer] built the system, and shows it off in the video after the break by dancing to James Brown’s I feel good.

The setup uses an Arduino … Read the rest

Give yourself a sixth sense on the cheap

sixth-sense-magnetic-ring

Hackaday regular [Mikey Sklar] is no stranger to body modifications. He enjoys tweaking his body in ways that help him with day to day tasks, including a ruler tattoo on his arm and an RFID chip embedded in the web of his hand. Lately, he has been toying around with a less invasive means of getting a better feel for … Read the rest

Frustrating fun with magnetic levitation

[Andrey Mikhalchuk] built his own magnetic levitation device and you can too… if you have the patience. He’s not using electromagnets, like the Arduino levitator or the floating globe. Instead, a pair of ceramic ring magnets and a few hours are all it takes.

The base of his device is a couple of very large ring magnets that would … Read the rest

Salvaged coil magnetizes tools on demand

magnetizing_wand

When working in hard to reach areas, magnetized tools can mean the difference between wrapping things up quickly and spending way too much time blindly grasping for dropped screws. [Damir] wrote in to share a handy little contraption he built which allows him to magnetize and demagnetize his tools as needed.

While rubbing a magnet against the tip of a … Read the rest

Automated chess set does it from below

You can get class credit for the coolest things these days. Take for instance, this Automatic Chessboard that [Brian] and [James] built for the final project in one of their classes this spring. We just looked at a robotic chess setup on Monday that used a gripper mounted on a gantry to move the pieces. This one’s a lot … Read the rest

Fabric speaker

The theory behind speaker operation is pretty simple. There’s a coil that is attached to some type of diaphragm and a permanent magnet. When electrical signals pass through the coil a magnetic field is generated, and that field’s interaction with the permanent magnet causes the diaphragm to vibrate and create sound. But we’ve always assumed that the vibrating material must … Read the rest

Gauss Weapons

This collection of gauss weapons use rare earth magnets to accelerate projectiles to damaging speeds. They work using the same concepts as a coil gun, but instead of just one projectile travelling along a length of guide track, there are many projectiles that work in a chain reaction. A series of magnets are placed at equal distances along the track. … Read the rest