Toy Robot Hand Vastly Improved, Now More Offensive

August 1, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 9 Comments

YouTube user [onefivefour] posted a video of his hacked up toy robot hand. These cheap robot hands usually only use one wire to move all five fingers. [onefivefour] improved upon the design and added five servos to allow independent control of each digit.

The servos are controlled by a PICAXE microcontroller, and [onefivefour] is willing to share the code. A few pressure sensors in the fingertips would turn this build into a great test bed for future development. It would also be great for an [Anakin Skywalker] Halloween costume if anyone on the planet ever wanted that specific costume.

[onefivefour] says he only spent $6 on his and while there’s more money sunk into the servos, it was probably a good investment. We love seeing hacked up pieces of plastic like the fully functional Wall-E or the dancing Androids. If you’ve got a toy hack in the works, drop us a line on our tip form.

This Robot Can Beat You At Pointless Games

May 28, 2011 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

We already know that robots can be smarter than us as evidenced by Watson beating [Ken Jennings] at Jeopardy, or Deep Blue beating [Garry Kasparov] at chess. Now [E024576] is striving to build a bot to compete at physical games.

For the challenge, he’s chosen one of the games from a television game show called Minute to Win It. This challenge is called Mad Dog, and lends its name to this robot. The goal is to pick up a ruler with two tic tac containers glued to it, then shake it until all of the candies are ejected from those containers. Check out what he’s come up with in the clip after the break. The machine is driven by a PIXAXE microcontroller, with input from an IR remote control. It reaches out, grips the ruler tightly, and shakes like there’s no tomorrow. Quite impressive, even if there’s very little purpose in its operation. That makes it the perfect task for robot, right?

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Making The Case For Cool Project Enclosures

May 16, 2011 by Mike Nathan 11 Comments

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Quite often, we see project boxes that seem to be constructed more as an afterthought than anything else. That’s not to say there is anything wrong with stuffing your latest creation into a nondescript black box, or even cardboard if it happens to fit your needs. Sometimes however, an enclosure embodies the spirit of a project, making it all that much cooler.

[Adam] recently picked up a copy of Make magazine and decided to build their “Luna Mod”, a sound effects generator and looper based on a PICAXE-08M. Aside from the micro controller the Luna Mod includes a couple of pots, a switch, and a few LEDs – nothing incredibly striking. Once he had everything assembled on a strip of protoboard, he started working on his enclosure.

The enclosure is made from an old record, which after some trial and error, [Adam] got just right. The record was heated and cut, then bent into shape. While it’s not necessarily a hack, we think it looks pretty slick. It really fits the theme of the Luna Mod and is far more attractive than a plain plastic box.

Stick around to see his sound generator in action.

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LED Matrix Glasses Keep All Eyes On You

May 3, 2011 by Mike Nathan 17 Comments

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Instructables user [llopez-garcia] was looking for something that would make him stand out at music events or clubs, and decided that an LED matrix built into a set of sunglasses would do the trick.

He grabbed some LEDs and the biggest pair of sunglasses he could find at WalMart, then he got down to business. He had no experience in programming micro controllers, so he chose a PICAXE 20X2 to run his glasses, figuring that it would be easier to program in BASIC for his first project than C.

He drilled holes in the lenses and wired up two 5×5 LED grids, connecting them to the PICAXE as a single 10×5 array. That setup was chosen because the 20X2 limited him to 15 usable pins and he wanted to avoid using a shift register or LED driver to keep the part count down. The rest of the build is relatively straightforward with resistors in all the right places, and a pair of AAA batteries to power it – one strapped to either temple.

We think these are pretty cool, though we’re not sure if he can see anything while wearing them. Then again, who cares? You don’t need to be able to see with glasses this awesome.

If he had to do it all over again, [llopez-garcia] says he would beef up the LED structure a bit, as well as choose a different micro controller that can be programmed in C since he felt the PICAXE was a bit limited by BASIC.

Stick around to see a quick demo video of the glasses in action.

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Egg Clock (it’s Egg-ceptional)

May 3, 2011 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

Easter is over and with some plastic eggs still on hand, [Franspaco] was looking for something to do with them. He decided to use an egg as an enclosure for a digital clock.

You can see that the finished project uses just one 7 segment LED display to show the time. A scrolling number method is used to delineate each digit of the 24-hour time readout. The display will go blank, followed by two numbers for the hours, a dash as a separator, and finally two more digits for the minutes. A PICAXE microcontroller drives the clock, but for accuracy a DS1307 does the timekeeping.

[Franspaco] etched his own circuit board that is sized to fit perfectly, housing the two chips, an LED, and a programming header. The on-board LED blinks at 1 Hz, giving some inner glow to the plastic shell. He accomplished most of his goals, but was unable to fit the batteries inside of one egg, prompting the need for a tethered power-egg. If he moves to surface mount components for the next generation of this device we think he’ll have no problem fitting a small battery (like an A23) inside.

Easter Egg Hacking

April 21, 2011 by Mike Nathan 7 Comments

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Spring is upon us and Instructables user [Mischka] decided it was a good idea to combine two flavors we never considered putting together: The Easter Bunny and the A-Team.

He decided to build the egg as an Easter gift for his brother, who is a huge fan of the A-Team. He found a slightly larger than normal plastic egg, and proceeded to paint the shell white, adding a printed picture of Mr. T once the paint had dried.

The guts of the egg are made up of a Picaxe 08M micro controller mounted on a Picaxe protoboard. Rather fond of buzzing, beeping audio, he decided to forgo a normal speaker and opted to use a piezo instead. To activate the music when the egg is shaken, a tilt switch was added to the board as well. He uploaded his software to the Picaxe, sealed up the egg, and called it a day.

We can imagine his brother will be pretty pleased with the creation – who wouldn’t be? We only wish that there was video of the egg in action.

PICAXE Using LEDs To Communicate

March 15, 2011 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

[Relwin] has being working on using LEDs as bi-directional devices. The setup above allows him to use each LED as an input, looking for a bright light source and then syncing up with the activity it receives. It is the most basic of communications using the components. The hardware at the heart of the system is a PICAXE development board on the left. The blinking light to the right causes the LED on the left of the picture to blink, but moving the blinking source over to that side will reverse the effect. The chip is programmed to play a tune on a piezo buzzer whenever a connection is lost. What is interesting to us is that these green LEDs will not detect a red LED flashing because the voltage threshold is different on the detector side of things.

He’s got some code available, but we’re really looking for the ideas of what to do with this concept. Maybe something along the lines of LED matrix video puzzles, or a variation on this laser-pointer LED game. Watch the demo video after the break and then let us know what you would use it for by leaving a comment.

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