I guess we’re on a UAV kick – I ran across this one when I was looking for interesting propeller projects. [Glenn]’s building this one based on a R/C helicopter he picked up. Both the controller and the heli recieved a propeller chip, along with a pretty standard array of navigation sensors for the heli. It’s a work in progress, but sometimes those are the most inspiring.
This hack isn’t really all that, but I’m giving it points for creativity. [Christopher] pulled some blue led case fans and used them to make a giant VU meter. Each I/O line has a transistor to drive a TIP120 FET. Personally, I’ll like to see even more of them stacked end to end and pulling fog from a conduit placed behind the stack.
[Lyle] sent in some of his work with mini-copters. This rig was built to test control methods with his mini-copter UAV. I’m hoping that some attention here will get him to document a bit of his home testing for us. (He’s working on some bigger systems professionally, so I’m not sure if he will.) The test rig uses an IR camera to measure pitch, yaw and three dimensional positioning 120 times a second.
[Jesse] sent in this beautiful 300 watt amp project. It uses six LM3886 amps to create a pair of 150 watt amps that are bridged to create a single 300 watt amplifier. Usually I don’t mind my lack of multi-language ability, but many of the parts were sourced from this site. It looks like the cases were bought in Hong Kong, anybody know were I could get some in the US?
I was looking for some ideas for one of my little projects, and I ran across this screen mask controller that [Danny] was working on a while back. The roller drops a mask down, and an optical encoder lets the controller know the position of the mask. The final version is supposed to support ethernet, but I couldn’t find any updates on the project.
Slapping a wifi card into a pc isn’t very ground breaking, but [Darkside] had to add a PCI header and trace the board just to hook up a keyboard before he could do much with his old intel vpn gateway. In the end, he added m0n0wall and a wireless card to turn it into a nice wireless router.
[John] sent in this cell phone activated rifle scope laser security camera blinder. The phone plays a tone when it receives a SMS message. The sound activates an audio controlled relay. (Not elegant, but it works) which powers a laser that’s been mounted to a rifle scope. The scope is used to align the laser with the target lens – on activation it’s supposed to blind the camera. Looks like a fun hack, even if the uses are a bit nefarious. (He left out a little detail that’ll make or break the project to keep things on the level, but it’s not that hard to figure out.)
