Month: August 2009

Pressure Sensitive Keyboard

August 9, 2009 by 45 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDI8eYIASf0]

The Applied Sciences group in Microsoft Hardware have come up with an interesting tool. This is a pressure sensitive keyboard. Our minds went strait to gaming, as theirs did too apparently. They show how this could give you more control in your games based on how hard you push the button. Remember the first time you got to use an analog stick, it sure is hard to go back to a D-pad. We want to know when we’ll get to play with these cool toys made by Microsoft.

Tiny Bluetooth Teardown

August 8, 2009 by 38 Comments

minibluetooth

The folks at SparkFun were startled by how small USB bluetooth adapters had become so they split one open. They noted a few interesting design features. It has a small folded trace antenna on the board edge. The metal USB housing acts as the RF shield. The bluetooth IC is an AS3620QA. Now we wonder what those tiny Buffalo drives look like inside.

Related: Eye-Fi teardown, storage/WiFi in an SD card

Giant Bulb VU Meter

August 8, 2009 by 20 Comments

bulb

The latest Inventgeek project is a 12 outlet control box. They decided to demo it using a giant bulb based VU meter. The control box has 12 individual outlets hooked up to two layers of six solid state relays. [Jared] notes that SSRs can be very expensive, but he purchased his on eBay for ~$10 each. Wiring and installation on this project is incredibly clean and they plan on using the control box for future how-tos. The simple audio circuit used for the VU is based on the LM3915. You’ll find full plans on the site or you can watch the overview video embedded below.

Continue reading “Giant Bulb VU Meter” →

OmniDirectional Research Platform

August 8, 2009 by 11 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bcoAqKhdL4]

[Shachar Geiger] sent in an interesting project that he worked on with [Tal Avivi] at the Bezalel academy in Jerusalem. They were given the task of designing a 1-person electrical urban vehicle. They took some cues from MIT’s Transology and designed the OmniDirectional Research Platform (ODRi). There’s a video of it embedded above. It can be driven using three different input styles: an accelerometer joystick, a traditional gamepad, or body mass shift. They started with an Arduino, but needed more I/O and had to switch to a Wiring board (this was before the Mega). The platform is built mostly from scrap. The accelerometers were placed in an old Microsoft Sidwinder. The standard joystick is from a Sega Mega Drive. The weight sensors are out of cheap home scales.

Thank You Ian Lesnet

August 7, 2009 by 16 Comments

A little over a year ago [Ian Lesnet] joined our hacking team and began cranking out some of the best original how-tos Hack a Day has ever offered. You may remember our popular web server on a business card from last fall and we’re sure everyone is familiar with the Bus Pirate (yes, they’re still on schedule).

It’s a year later and he’s found himself with less time to contribute. [Ian] is stepping down from blogging at Hack a Day, but you’ll find him right where he started: in the comments. You can also reach him directly on whereisian.com. [Ian] will be continuing to develop the Bus Pirate. You’ll find the latest info on the Bus Pirate’s Google Code page. He’s also posted a guide to the on-board pull-up resistors as well as a self-test guide that uses the new v2.0 firmware to confirm your Bus Pirate is working.

[Ian]’s contributions will be greatly missed. We’re always excited when we add contributors of his caliber to our crew.

Droplet

August 7, 2009 by 16 Comments

[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/5989780]

[Andrew Rapp] sent in this project called Droplet. He’s been doing work with Xbees and Arduinos together and built this little toy. He describes it as “sort of like a Chumby”. It has built in services for Twitter, Google Calendar, News, Gmail, etc.  You can download the full source code and plans on his site. His next planned revisions include possibly running it from a sheevaplug, making a nice case for it, and utilizing the unused pins of the arduino.

CPU Tachometer

August 7, 2009 by 35 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nAeftaUWYw]

Recently, analog displays have come back in vogue. This is partially due to the common steam punk theme that is popular right now. [Cristiano] has done an analog display, but instead of brass and polished wood, he’s gone automotive themed (Internet Archive Cache) with it. He purchased a cheap tachometer from ebay.  A circuit had to be designed to give the tach the signals needed for it to operate, and you can download the schematic from his site. As you can see in the video above, it works well. We think that “shift” light might get annoying pretty quickly.