Month: October 2008

Commercial Self-balancing Unicycle

October 18, 2008 by 12 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-9mYCXNshQ&fmt=18]

Focus Design sent us a video of their self balancing unicycle (looks like they’re taking on Focus Features too). The electric machine moves at 8MPH and lasts 1.5hrs on a single charge. It only weighs 24.6lbs. They say that new riders only need about 2hrs. practice. They’re building ten units to start for $1500 each.

Electric unicycles are nothing new to our community. We’ve long been fans of [Trevor Blackwell]’s electric unicycle. [Trevor] spent several months learning how to ride a regular unicycle before he could properly debug the electric version. There are several other designs out there: The Einrand-Fahrzeug has a wide wheel to make balancing easier. The eniCycle includes a steering mechanism. The Uniquecycle has a brushless motor in hub for a compact design. We did a roundup back in July that covers these plus many other motorized unicycle concepts.

IPhone Controlled R/C Car

October 17, 2008 by 22 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2EJ2kouK7U]

Is controlling an R/C car with its own remote too mundane for you? Do you feel the need to involve a web server and an iPhone in the process? This project might just be perfect for you. By connecting the R/C controller to a microcontroller board, and feeding it signals via a website from your iPhone, you can control the car as if you had the original controller in your hand. In case you missed it, he’s lugging a laptop, a circuit board, and the original controller along with him. They do make a few improvements though, such as speed control by using pulse width modulation. I guess that makes up for having to lug the computer around too.

[thanks Humberto]

Tiny Arduino Ethernet Board

October 17, 2008 by 15 Comments

[sgk] built this tiny ethernet board to be used with the Arduino. It’s based on a WIZnet W5100 chip. The chip handles all of the TCP/IP communication and you talk to it via SPI. It’s compatible with the standard Arduino ethernet library. [sgk] hand soldered these boards including the 80pin LQFP main chip. His next project is to put the AVR and W5100 all on the same board. It sounds like he’ll use components larger than 1005 though.

LED POV Hard Drive Clock

October 17, 2008 by 29 Comments

[Ian Smith] sent us this POV display made from an old hard drive. It works by flashing some LEDs under the platter, which has a line cut in it. Since the platter spins at roughly 90 rotations per second, we perceive a solid image. He was inspired by [Alan Parekh]’s project, but did several things differently. Mounting the LEDs was much simpler in this project as he had a strip of RGB LEDs that came with adhesive tape on the back. He also used a small magnet and a hall effect sensor to measure full rotations instead of an IR beam sensor. Check the video after the break.

Continue reading “LED POV Hard Drive Clock” →

Prototype This Schematics Posted

October 16, 2008 by 26 Comments

As promised, [Joe Grand] has uploaded the schematics from his part of last night’s episode of Prototype This. The device monitors the driver of a demo derby car and shuts it off if he becomes too enraged. He’ll be posting schematics for every episode as they’re released. The really interesting thing is that he scanned all of his development notes too. If you missed the episode, you can watch it on Discovery’s site. You can also grab a version that doesn’t idiotically force you to watch in full screen browser window from The Pirate Bay.

UPDATE: [Joe] has been responding to your comments.

PSP 3000 Teardown

October 16, 2008 by 51 Comments

If you absolutely feel an incessant need to see the innards of every new piece of equipment out there, you’ll probably be excited to see that the PSP 3000 has been disassembled and photographed. Apparently there isn’t much new here. The screen has been replaced with one that has 5 times the contrast ratio, twice the color range, and a refresh rate that is twice as fast. Other than that, there’s a built in microphone and a mystery “PS” button.

[via Engadget]

UberBong: Evaporative PC Cooling, Probably

October 16, 2008 by 24 Comments

We’re not 100% sure what exactly is going on here. It appears to be a massive evaporative cooling rig for a computer, though the title has us wondering if it doesn’t have any other uses. There isn’t much of a description, but we felt the sheer magnitude of this cooling system warranted some publicity. Some digging around shows that this was out in 2003, but it is new to us.

[via reddit]