Month: May 2009

Laser Cut Drum Kit

May 22, 2009 by 14 Comments

drums

[Segwaymonkey] picked up an arduino based drumkit circuit and needed a kit to place it on. He worked up a pretty cool design and had it laser cut out of acrylic. The cool part of the design is how he delt with the head motion of the drum. Each head has 4 “springs” that were also cut from the acrylic. The Arduino based drum circuit sits on a little pedestal in the middle, as though it were on display. We really like the design, but we have to wonder if a little noise dampening on the heads might be a good idea. He hasn’t released the plans, but says he might once he gets it perfect.

Wireless Portable USB Tether

May 21, 2009 by 13 Comments

USB

[Pete] has put together a fairly simple writeup on building a wireless USB tether for your DSLR. He’s basically using a pair of USB wireless adapters and a battery pack. In his original version, he did some slight modification to the dock that powers the USB dongle, adding his own battery pack too. He notes that this whole project can be done without the effort he put into it, at a little more expense.  The only improvement we think would be nice would be a better way to package it to keep it out of the way while you shoot.

Folding Hexapod Bodies

May 21, 2009 by 11 Comments

SideBySide (Custom)

At Berkeley, they’re coming up with new ways to make their itty bitty hexapods. These are basically tiny flatpacked bodies cut from cardboard. The end goal is to not only make them smaller and faster to build, but to reduce the friction in the joints.  You can download the files on their site as well as download movies of them in action.  For a larger and somewhat less complicated flatpacked robot, check out the flatpacked 2 motor walker.

[thanks  Thuli]

Digital Dice

May 20, 2009 by 13 Comments

dnd

There have been several attempts at bringing Dungeons & Dragons up to date with modern technology. Most attempts have been in the form of computer games that somehow fail to capture the essential experience. This attempt, however seems to add some techie flair to while keeping the game the same. [Itay] has built some digital dice. Simply choose how many sides you want your dice to have, then give it a shake.  OK, a random number generator isn’t that groundbreaking, but he did have to do some pretty intense soldering. The LED matrix is pretty cool, but we like looking at the back. You can see it in the video after the break.

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Color Detection Using An RGB LED

May 20, 2009 by 30 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqboDjQX0UE]

[Kyri] has made a simple circuit to do color detection using an RGB LED. Simply set the LED to the color you want to detect then wave the object over it. Another LED will light up if the object is the same color as the LED. The detection is done by a photo resistor. The theory is that an object will reflect more of the light that matches its surface color. She shows that this kind of detection could be useful for sorting in robotics.

D-Link Router Captcha Broken

May 19, 2009 by 24 Comments

d-link

We reported last week that D-Link was adding captchas to their routers to prevent automated login by malware. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t work all time. The team from SourceSec grabbed the new firmware and began poking at it. They found that certain pages don’t require the authentication to be passed for access. One of these is WPS activation. WPS lets you do push button WPA configuration. Once activated, any nearby client can request the WPA key using a tool like WPSpy. Only user level credentials are needed to pull this off, so changing just the admin password won’t prevent it.

[photo: schoschie]