Fresh hacks every day
Throw your indoor cat a bone (or a tuna steak as it were) this year by building them a summer vacation spot. Since [Travis Brown] lives on a busy street he worries that his cat would get hit by a car if allowed to roam outside. He and a friend found a suitable alternative with this outdoor cat enclosure. The centerpiece of the build is a platform that overlooks the back yard. It's got a couple … [Read more...]
Careful, this hack might foster doubts about the level of fun you're having at you own Computer Science department. Last weekend a group of students at MIT pulled off a hack of great scale by turning a building into a Tetris game board. The structure in question is the Green Building on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Campus. It houses the Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences … [Read more...]
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 the heat in his apartment and for the entire Canadian winter, his … [Read more...]
If you're paying big bucks for those floor-to-ceiling windows why not make them into a canvas for your art as well. Der Kritzler is a motorized plotter that can make this into a reality. It's a laser-cut pen holder suspended from a pair belt pulleys. Those belts have counterweights, which make it easier for the stepper motors to move the pen jig smoothly. The firmware running on the Arduino that … [Read more...]
[Niklas Roy] built a motorized window curtain to screen out foot traffic in front of his window. When you hear "motorized curtain" you may think that this will move up and down but it doesn't. Instead, the small curtain move horizontally to cover passersby as they travel down the sidewalk. This is accomplished using a camera in conjunction with some motion sensing software. In the video after the … [Read more...]
It's no secret that the central US is feels like a very humid oven right now. [Erik's] window AC hack might help you out if you're coping with triple-digit temperatures. He added network connectivity to the unit above but the picture is a bit deceiving. The blue CAT-5 cable that enters the bottom isn't connecting directly to the network, but extends the up and down button connections for the unit … [Read more...]
Winscape will let you replace that garbage-strewn ally view with just about anything you want. The two windows above are actually plasma screen televisions. In between them you can spot a Nintendo Wii Remote that is used to track an IR badge worn by the person in the room. As they move, the images on the screens are changes to simulate the change in perspective you would see out of a real-world … [Read more...]
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