Here’s [Rob]‘s free form circuit that’s a Christmas ornament for geeks. It looks great, but sadly isn’t powered through a Christmas light strand. It’s just as cool as the skeletal Arduino we saw.

Prototyping with flowers

Well this is interesting: protoboard that’s specifically made to make SMD soldering easier. The guys at elecfreaks went through a lot of design iterations to make sure it works.

We’ll call it Buzz Beer

The days are getting longer and cabin fever will soon set in. Why not brew beer in your coffee maker? It’s an oldie but a goodie.

Christmas oscilloscope

With just an ATtiny and a little bit of  futzing around changing the coefficients of a partial differential equation, you too can have your very own oscilloscope Christmas tree. Don’t worry though, there are instructions on how to implement it with an Arduino as well. HaD’s own [Kevin] might be the one to beat, though.

So what exactly does a grip do?

You know what your home movies need? A camera crane, of course. You’ll be able to get some neat panning action going on, and maybe some shots you couldn’t do otherwise. Want a demo? Ok, here’s a guy on a unicycle.

[Fabien] wrote in to share a link to this RGB video display which he made. He’s got some pretty cool routines that make it more functional than you would think, but first we want to comment on the construction. He used an RGB strip, which makes this look like an incredibly simple build. The strip has a data and power bus running the length of it. You can it into smaller segments, then just solder jumper wires to reconnect the buses. That’s exactly what he did here, making it what must be the fastest method of putting together a display of this size (16×10 pixels).

It’s driven by a Netduino which easily addresses the LPD8806 drivers responsible for the LEDs. It gets input from a computer via Xbee, making it easy to include data from the net, or to push visualizations. The video after the break shows a [Van Gogh] self-portrait. Since 160 pixel resolution wouldn’t do it justice, the visualization software shows a zoomed in portion of the painting which is constantly panning to let you see the entire work. It’s a fabulous effect.

This week, we are bringing you the final video in our series where [Jack] uses the 3pi robot as a fancy development board for the ATmega328p processor. Today’s video deals with interrupts. If you have been wanting to have your programs do more than one thing simultaneously, interrupts are the solution. [Jack] discusses various ways that you can use interrupts in your programs and then shows how he created a interrupt routine that drives the 3pi’s beeper. He also shows the routines that enable, disable, and control the interrupt.

Since this is the last post for this series of videos, we are posting the code used for all of the previous videos. Click here to grab a copy.

For our next series of videos, we are going to attempt something more challenging so most likely we will be taking a couple of weeks off to do some development before presenting it here. Stay tuned folks, we’ll be back.

Video is after the break…

In case you missed any of the previous videos, check out these links:

Part 1: Setting up the development environment
Part 2: Basic I/O
Part 3: Pulse Width Modulation
Part 4: Analog to Digital conversion
Part 5: Working with the 3pi’s line sensors

That black box is hiding all kinds of goodies that make this rover a hacking playground. [Andrey] built the device around a BeagleBoard, which offers the processing power and modules that he needed to make the rest of it work.

The control unit shrinks the pilot down to the rover’s size, using a cockpit that has a steering wheel and other controls, and a monitor playing the stream from the camera on the front of the bot. It has a WiFi adapter which allows control via the Internet. The camera, which can be rotated thanks to its servo mounting, feeds the video to the BeagleBoard where it is compressed using the h264 codec (more about that and the cockpit here) to lighten the streaming load. You’ll also find an ultrasonic rangefinder on the front for obstacle avoidance, and a magnetic compass for orientation information. Finally, a GPS bolsters that data, allowing you to plot your adventures on the map.

It’s great, but it will cost you. Material estimates are North of five hundred Euros!

[Dan Rosenfeld] does a lot of thinking in his spare time, and one thing he returns to pretty often is videoconferencing. He’s often wondered why it hasn’t caught on enough to become a ubiquitous piece of technology, and his examination of the topic in regards to eye contact and spatial awareness inspired him to create a very unique Halloween costume.

His “Big Head” costume consists of a front-mounted 24” LCD panel that displays the wearer’s face in real time. Inside the large headpiece [Dan] installed a microphone, another LCD screen, a half silvered mirror, and a video camera – not to mention all of the power-related goodies required to keep it running. While the main LCD displays his face, the internal monitor is fed by an externally mounted camera that shows him everything going on outside the box. This image is reflected off the half silvered mirror, allowing him to gaze directly at the camera, while also seeing what’s going on in front of him.

As you can see in the video below, the effect is pretty cool, and devoid of the ‘disconnected’ look most people have when talking to others via a camera and computer screen.

In this week’s video, we continue on where we left off last week with another in our series of videos where we discuss how to program for the ATmega328p processor. This week, [Jack] takes a look at the analog to digital converter and takes us through how to set things up and then how to perform a conversion using the potentiometer on the 3pi as the analog source. Playing with potentiometers isn’t the most interesting thing in the world, but after watching this video, you will be able to do things like take light readings using a cadmium sulfide cell, read the weight applied to a sensor, calculate the temperature from a resistor and a thermistor, or interface with an analog gyroscope.

If you have missed our previous videos, here are some links:
Part 1: Setting up the development environment
Part 2: Basic I/O
Part 3: Pulse Width Modulation

Stay tuned for next week’s* video where we will take a look at how to interface with the 3pi’s line sensors.

Video is after the break…

* HAD is in the process of moving our secret headquarters so next week’s video may come some time later than next week.

Today we continue on with part 2 of our series where [Jack] shows how to program for the ATmega328p processor using the Pololu 3pi robot. In this video, he starts to dig deeper than last week’s video by showing you how to program in C so that you are directly reading inputs and directly sending data to outputs. Specifically, this video shows how to set up your I/O pins and then how to interface with LEDs, buttons, and a beeper.

There were a few comments on last week’s video about not wanting to buy a 3pi robot to learn on. That’s fine. For this series there really is no reason that you need to use the 3pi robot. We picked it because it is a great device to learn about the ATmega processors since it has so many things that you can play around with to get your feet wet but there really is no reason that you couldn’t wire up a DIP version on a perfboard and still follow along with these videos. In fact, if you have a good writeup about the cheapest possible way to get started with the ATmega series of processors, we’d love to hear about it.

Looking for part 1 of this series? [Click Here]

Video is after the break.

Many of you are familiar with the Arduino. Many of you hate it…* This post isn’t about the Arduino. It is about the processor that is at the heart of many Arduino boards. If you are in the camp of people who can’t understand why others dislike the Arduino so much, this series is for you. In this series of videos, [Jack] will explore how to program for the ATmega328p processor using C. If you have been programming for the Arduino, you may have had some issues with the speed of your code at points. Programming in C will allow you to wring out nearly the last ounce of processing power that the ATmega processors can provide. It will also let you access the peripherals on the processor directly and to switch between different processors when you need more (or less) capabilities.

In this first video, [Jack] shows you all of the features of the 3pi robot, which he will be using as a fancy development board for the ATmega328p. He then shows you how to get your development environment set up and then walks you through one of the sample programs provided for the 3pi robot.

*Here at Hackaday, we are officially neutral in the ongoing Arduino love/hate war. We don’t care what microcontroller is used in the hacks that we show, only that they are cool.

Video is after the break!

For those of you who followed along with our Eagle CAD series, here is the final payoff where we assemble the circuit board that was designed. In this video, [Jack] explains where things will go on the board and then shows you how to solder the parts. For the advanced folks out there who haven’t moved to solely surface mount parts when you can get away with it, he shows an easy way to solder the processor, which is a TQFP-44 part. This can seem like a daunting task but it really isn’t.

If you would like to make your own board like this, you can find the files here. Please note that although this board shouldn’t have any issues, we haven’t tested it ourselves yet. [Jack] is going to do some videos about a different topic for a few weeks but will pick back up with this board again when they are done.

Video is after the break.

This week’s video is the last in a series of videos where we show how to use Eagle CAD. Today we will look a the Layout portion of the program and will create a circuit board from the schematic that we created previously. We start by creating a layout file and then moving all of the parts to appropriate places on the circuit board. After that, [Jack] shows how to route the traces. Along the way, he talks about the tools that he is using and various ways to use them. The end result is a prototyping board for the PIC18F44J11.

Like the others, this video is fairly long at 29 minutes, so make sure to have some time dedicated towards watching it if you do.

In next week’s video, we will be showing this board as it arrived to us from a manufacturer and will do a tutorial on how to solder.

If you have missed our previous videos, you can find them here:

Schematic part I
Schematic and Custom part creation
CAM Processor

We have also created many supplemental videos explaining how to use many of the tools in the tool palettes. You can find them on our Youtube channel:

Check out the video after the break!

Here is the next installment in our series of Eagle CAD videos. In this video we skip ahead a bit and show off the CAM processor that you use to create the files necessary to have your circuit boards be manufactured. After watching this video, you will know how create a new CAM program, load a circuit board into the CAM processor, tell it where to save your files, and actually use it to create the files.

We’re skipping ahead today because of a screw up on our part. We meant to show the layout portion of the program today but edited the wrong video… We’ll show layout next week. After that, we will show the completed circuit board and solder the parts onto it.

If you are itching for some Eagle CAD layout info, you may be interested in some supplementary videos that we have uploaded to our Youtube channel. In those videos, we show how to use the most important features in the layout portion of the Eagle CAD.

Have you missed the previous videos? Here are some links to them:

Schematic and the beginning of a custom part: [click here]
More custom part stuff: [click here]

Video is after the break:

This is a fairly long video, clocking in at about 25 minutes, so be prepared to dedicate a chunk of time.

[John] wrote in to tell us about this contest hosted by Avnet. All one has to do is upload a video of their design to Avnet’s Youtube page.  There are four categories to choose from including: Solar, Communications, Transportation, and Entertainment. Four contestants can win an iPad2.

The only catch, if you can call it that, is that one would have to use at least one component from their “more than five million SKUs available.”  The thing that makes this contest more interesting than it usually would be is that there appears to be no contest entries as of August 24th. Official rules can be found on their site here.

The contest runs through the end of August, so there isn’t a lot of time to get a design together. However, it’s possible that you have something already built that fits into their product catalog. Make a 30-90 second video of it in action and you’ve got a (very good apparently) chance of winning an iPad2! Check out the contest video after the break.
via [Hackersbench.com]

Hackaday headquarters has recently been overrun by techno-groupies hanging around outside so we decided to take some measures to discourage that. A word of warning though, if last week’s video ruffled your feathers then you probably shouldn’t watch this one. In this video [Jack] shows you how to create a stun glove using a disposable camera and some leather spikes. To prove that it really works, he intentionally takes a jolt from it courtesy of Hackaday’s security chief [Vlad].

Check out the video after the break.

Like last week’s video, we don’t recommend that you actually try this. This is a weapon and is dangerous by its very nature. As [Jack] attests to in the video, it hurts to get zapped by a device like this. If you are to take anything away from this video, it might be that you should treat disposable cameras with respect if you choose to take one apart.

Like seeing our writers get shocked? Here is a video of [Caleb] being shocked with a Tazer at CES last year.

If you have had it with persistent weeds that seem to come back no matter what you do, here is an ‘environmentally friendly’ way to kill them off permanently. By using a probe charged with 2400 Volts, [Jack] shows how you can conduct the electricity through the plant and all the way down into its roots while scorching the living daylights out of what sits above the ground.

Check out the video after the break….

Before you get to the video, a word of warning. In this video [Jack] takes apart a microwave oven. Microwave ovens can cook meat. You are made out of meat. DO NOT power up your microwave in a half assembled state with the magnetron still connected. Also, since microwave transformers can produce high voltages, you should be extremely cautious about what you touch while the transformer is connected to wall power. The electricity coming out of the microwave transformer can kill you. It won’t be slow and it won’t be funny so be careful.

In this video, [Jack] initially has the transformer wired up incorrectly. Below is a picture of how things should be connected.

Thanks to [Grenadier] who helped to make this video a success. We have featured several of his projects here such as this one where he wound his own transformer to make some incredible arcs.

—- Update —-

A recent trip to the office park seems to show that this was a success. There are many different individual plants in the bunch but the ones that actually were hit by the high voltage are yellow and dead. The others right next to where we were zapping are not looking as healthy as other plants nearby.