I’m at the beach this week – finally on vacation. Thanks to DD-WRT, I’ve got a handy wireless repeater to keep the beach house covered with network access. [sprite_tm]’s doing his best to make my vacation easier. He built this knock activated automatic door opener for a friend who wanted easy access to some locked, but empty flat (think british apartment) rooms. He used an ATTINY with some fets to drive the stepper (you can find those in old dot matrix printers for free) and a small transistor amped mic circuit to pick up the knocks. Knock the right code, and you’ll get let right in.
Month: June 2007
XT To AT Keyboard Adapter
If you dig the older switch based keyboards, you’ll like this. As a favor to a friend, [Bob van Loosen] built a small converter using a pic16F84 to make an XT telex keyboard usable with modern AT style computers.
Powerglove Wiimote
How, oh how did I miss this one? (original) A japanese hacker merged a powerglove with a wiimote. Need I say more? Seriously, who didn’t want a powerglove when they came out? video of the thing in action is after the break.
Quick extra:
It turns out that the Wii Nunchuck is a great source for parts. It’s got a 3-axis accelerometer, joystick and buttons for a mere $20 [chad]’s wrote a full how-to on turning a wii controller into a bluetooth transmitter and an interface for the wii nunchuck for the Arduino.
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Wireless Lightbulb
[atrain] sent in this interesting wireless light bulb. It’s more of a wireless powered LED inside a lightbulb, but you get the idea. A RF signal is recieved by a coil inside the bulb – the AC signal is rectified and used by LEDs to create the light. All the technical details you need to build your own are here.
Steampunk LCD
Suspend In Motion
Reader [Brien Schultz] didn’t like his laptop suspending every time he closed the lid to move around the house or to a different work area, so he turned that feature off. Of course that just led to him forgetting to put the thing to sleep when he really needed to, like when he was walking around all day with it in his backpack. To solve his self inflicted problem (common cause of many hacks) he wrote a .NET program to monitor the laptop’s accelerometer. The accelerometer is usually used to park the hard drive heads in case the laptop is falling (it’s also used for hilarity). If BedTime detects that the laptop is in motion, but is not being used it starts a countdown and eventually puts the laptop to sleep. Brien isn’t using the “sleep after X minutes” option because it would put the machine to sleep while it was open and he was just distracted for a few moments. Demo video after the break.
Milkscanner – 3D Mapping That’s Good For You
[Blind Tree Frog] sent in the Milkscanner. It’s an oh-so-simple method of mapping a 3d object. [fiezi] used a small tub, a lego mounted webcam, a small supply of milk and a bit of software to create the map and import it to moviesandbox.. The object is placed in the tub, then then it’s scanned by the camera as the milk level is slowly raised (in this case, via spoon power) and voila: 3d map.
Video is after the jump, or at the top of the read link.
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