Nerf Sentry Gun With Image Recognition

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

Here’s another hacked Nerf Vulcan rifle. This time it is an automated sentry gun. You must present it your badge, if no badge is found, you are assaulted with a fiery storm of small nerf darts. All encounters are logged and a photos are kept. This was a final project at Cornell, and for once it wasn’t ECE.  This was for CS1114. They did a pretty good job with the tracking, now they need to add some more interesting voice options to it.

8×8 RGB Small Form Factor Toy

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q38NxsKetgo]

Here’s a cool tip, sent in by [Martin]. He has put together this very compact package for an animated 8×8 RGB LED array with a tiny footprint. It is controlled by an ATMega16 powered by 2 small lithium cells. While it may not be quite as small as the space invader button, it seems to have a bit more animation horsepower.

Magic Wands For Disney

[NRP] sent us a few of his projects. The most notable of the bunch was a school project funded by Disney. They were to make some kind of interactive entertainment for people waiting in line for rides. They decided on a wand style interface. Each wand has an accelerometer, an IR LED for tracking, an XBee unit, and a few buttons for interaction. They wrote some custom games and a multi person white board to test it all out.  You can see those in action, along with a space themed pong game in the video after the break. Even though this was funded by Disney, you can still find all the source code and schematics, available for free.

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