[Michael Davis] sent in his homemade laptop tray. He does a lot of traveling in his Toyota Tacoma and was looking for a good way to mount his laptop inside. Unfortunately, [Michael] soon discovered that commercial laptop trays can be very expensive and difficult to install. He saw an opportunity in the empty cup holder in his car. Fifteen dollars worth of PVC pipe fittings and a piece of plywood later he had a laptop tray.
Strobit looks like it could be a project to keep an eye on. The entire project is open source, including the hardware. The aim is to build a low cost, low power, wireless enable arduino powered widget. This seems like it could really cut down on the development time of many projects we’ve seen here. Development is still ongoing but it looks like they’ve already implemented some mesh networking similar to the zigbee systems.
[via hackaday flickr pool]
This project provides an opportunity to conduct near space experiments. The flight computer, BalloonSat Extreme, is controlled by a BASIC Stamp 2pe. The complete BOM with PCB artwork is provided. There is enough hardware to control cameras, servos, a Gps, and five digital I/O. The computer is also equipped with a 12 bit ADC to log experiment results. The device seems limited to 30KB of storage. Though the author suggests this memory limitation is more than adequate, we are wondering if an implementation of the Nyquist sampling theorem is in use at all. For further reading the author has provided information regarding Amateur Radio High Altitude Ballooning.
[via adafruit]
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/4821403%5D
[Mangonha] has put together this interesting project involving aluminium can recycling (translated, sortof). They’re using an arduino to tally up how much aluminium they have accumulated. That information is then passed on and displayed on a google map. There are families that go around collecting the cans as a means of income, and this system could be very helpful to them. They state that their goal is to eventually have restaraunts and more families included. We’re a bit curious about how helpful this really is. How is that information actually changing the actions of the collectors? Would a simple flag on your door or window signalling enough cans to pick up or not be just as effective?
[via the Make flickr pool]
Researchers at UC San Diego have been working on a robot that learns facial expressions. Starting with a bunch of random movements of the face “muscles”, the robot is rewarded each time it generates something that is close to an existing expression. It has slowly developed several recognizeable expressions itteratively. We have a few questions. First, are we the only ones who see a crazy woman with a mustache in the picture above? Why is that? What makes [Einstein] look so effiminate in that picture? Secondly, what reward do you give a robot? You can actually see this guy in action in a video after the break.
Maxim’s iButtons, which are small ICs in button-sized disks, are starting to show up in more and more places. They have a range of uses, from temperature loggers to identification, and all use the 1-wire protocol to communicate. Over a furrtek, they hacked an iButton used for buying things from vending machines and created an infinite money cheat. They built a small rig based on the ATmega8 to read and write data to the chip. The data was encrypted, so it wasn’t feasible to put an arbitrary amount on the card. Instead, they used a similar technique to the Boston subway hack and restored a previous state to the iButton after something was bought. They also created a hand-held device to backup and restore the contents of a button for portable hacking.
[Thanks furrtek]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zmp74fO2a38]
Using an MSA-T MIDI Decoder from Highly Liquid, [Rob Darman] was able to take the MIDI output of his Roland V-Drums and use that output to control fire shooting cannons, forming a setup that he calls fire drums. As seen in the video above, the response time between the V-Drums and the fire drums is pretty impressive. While this is by far one of the coolest things that we’ve seen controlled by MIDI, we’re naturally thinking about taking this to the next level; MIDI-controlled fireworks, anyone?
You may remember the MSA decoder devices from people wiring up MIDI drums to Rock Band.
