This antenna tuner is controlled remotely using geared motors and legos. The tuner needed to be closer to the antenna for performance reasons. This created a problem; most of the radio gear is inside while the tuner is outside. The gear motors and Legos combine to form a closed loop servo, operating two air core caps and an inductor switch. A control box placed near the radio is hard wired to the modded tuner outside. We would like to see something like this under gesture control using the Wii MotionPlus + Arduino.
Day: July 3, 2009
Last Day To Preorder Your Bus Pirate
Update, Saturday July 4th, 2009: All preorders are closed.
Today is the last day to pre-order a Bus Pirate. Get your own Bus Pirate, fully assembled and shipped worldwide, for only $30. We don’t plan to make more soon, this could be your last chance.
A special shout out to our partner, Seeed Studio, who handled the rush of orders like pros. The first pre-order is already being manufactured, and will ship as soon as possible. Seeed still has a few V2a PCBs if you’d like to roll your own Bus Pirate.
You’ve made this pre-order a huge success, and we’d like to make more projects available in the future. Were you just interested in the Bus Pirate? Should we arrange pre-orders of future Hack a Day hardware? Are there any past projects that we should revisit?
Tiniest Bot, Sort Of. CNC Controlled
Here’s an interesting concept, the bot pictured above has no internal control mechanisms. His claims to have built the smallest bot are dubious, considering it requires a much larger control platform to function, so lets just set that aside and look at how it works. The bot itself is basically a hollow box with a hinged manipulator mounted on it. He has then built a modified CNC type structure with various magnets below a platform. The magnets can move the bot and control the manipulator (assuming the bot isn’t trying to pick up anything magnetic). He talks about this being a possible control scheme for smaller bots, though we think he would have to make some major advancements to his magnetic controls for accuracy’s sake. As for his claims of being the smallest, well, we’re sure we’ve seem similarly sized bots, even hexapods, that were completely self contained.
WTF-O-meter
Here’s something every office probably needs. Ours does at least. It’s a WTF counter. When the office gets just a little too weird, someone hits the button and it gets logged. It’s probably pretty easy to judge the day by the WTF chart. The button is connected to an Arduino that updates the status on a local web server. We can imagine a nice bar graph of WTFs per day, or possibly a pie chart with normal time vs WTF time. Unfortunately, imagining is all we’re going to do. They didn’t include any examples of the visualizations. Can you imagine saying something to a co worker just for them to promptly march over and slap the WTF button? Maybe we don’t need one.