Month: December 2009

Interactive Beer Pong Table

December 15, 2009 by 20 Comments

Do you find that beer pong is too dull on its own to keep your attention? Do you require flashing lights to accentuate your imbibing?  Here’s the perfect solution. Make an interactive beer pong table. It didn’t take much to sell us on the idea. We think everything needs a few more lights.

The idea is that as the game progresses, you get different feedback from the lights visible in the picture above.  [rohitk] is using an Arduino and some pressure sensors to tell when each cup is removed. Based on this the LEDs change color.

Social Media HUD

December 15, 2009 by 9 Comments

[youtube = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnPfnEWFie0%5D

After [Gregg Benjamin] read our story about a simple physical email notifier, he decided to test his skills and add some touches of his own. Rather than limiting his notifier to just email, he has added support for displaying Pandora Radio songs, Facebook notifications, and email all to a LCD. He even has included code for an optional motion detector, as well as support for text message notification. We always love it when our stories inspire our readers to bring their own various solutions to similar problems, so we hope some of you take the code he has supplied (written in python for desktop side, and Arduino sketches for the microcontroller side) and add support for your own interests. Might we suggest RSS feed support, or other social media such as reddit or Google Reader? Let us know if you add something cool, and we might do a follow-up!

[Gregg] doesn’t have a blog of his own, so we have posted the demo video to YouTube, and he has provided all of his related code and images to Megaupload (warning, file is ~115 MB). Sorry to anyone looking for a blog link.

BrickAVR: The Proto-brick

December 15, 2009 by 12 Comments

Sometimes, prototyping systems need to be robust, full-featured, and powerful. Other times, nostalgia and simplicity are much more appealing. Rather than buying a pre-made prototyping board, one of our readers grabbed some parts lying around, including an Atmega8, a SMD 16Mhz oscillator, and a 6 pin ISP header, and performed some circuit origami free-form soldering (thanks [Gilberti]!). After it was assembled, he realized that it fit in a hollowed out 2×6 Lego brick rather easily. After adding female headers to the pins, as well as a label and some hot glue to seal it up, he was left with a fully functional, and most likely very durable centerpiece to a project. We would love to see this worked into a Lego Mindstorm robot, just for the sake of fitting in.

Make Magazine – Open Source Hardware 2009

December 15, 2009 by 5 Comments

Former HaD’er [Phillip Torrone] has written an extensive collection of Open Source Hardware projects for Make Magazine. This impressive list covers over 125 projects and kits, broken into 19 categories including 3d Printing, Music, Robotics, and Wireless systems. A number of these projects have been either extensively detailed or mentioned on HaD, so there is bound to be something for everyone here.

[Phillip] is not only detailing these projects for people new to the Open Source Hardware movement, but is also calling for new and unheard of projects to be listed in places like this, as well as central locations such as the OSH Wikipedia page. We are sure that a number of HaD readers will be answer this challenge.

Thanks again to [Phillip] for sharing this with us.

Odroid: All The Open, None Of The Contract

December 14, 2009 by 33 Comments

The Odroid derives its name from the combination of Open and Android. The hardware is aimed at the portable gaming market and runs Android. The specs are amazing, the device is open and begging you to develop for the platform.

The Samsung S5PC100 System-On-A-Chip provides the device with an ARM Cortex-A8 processor running at 833MHz. The usual suspects are all here, a capacitive touchscreen, accelerometer, SDHC slot, and WiFi. What you usually don’t expect to see is a serial debugger and 720p HD output. But the best part, we get all of this without a 2 year contract or the hardware being locked down as we’re used to with and Android based cell phone.

[Thanks Stillbourne via LinuxDevices]

Monitor Keg Volume, CO2, And Temp

December 14, 2009 by 13 Comments

[Jean-Michel] tipped us off about his beer keg monitoring setup. It can tell you how much beer is left in each keg, how much carbon dioxide remains in the canister, and it can monitor and regulate temperature.

An Arduino mega is the brain of the system. A shield was built to interface force sensors, measuring the weight of the keg to estimate how much beer remains. Analog temperature sensors allow for temperature monitoring and control of the compressor for regulation. Information can be displayed on a graphic LCD or a computer via XBee wireless communications.

This is along the lines of the SparkFun kegerator but we like the added functionality. Does this need to Twitter? Probably not but if you want that, it’s only a bit of a software hack away.

Fabric Display

December 14, 2009 by 12 Comments

[Eli] is sharing the building details on her fabric based display. For lack of a better name she’s calling this a fabric Lite-Brite. This is because LEDs can be added anywhere to spell out a message or create a simple drawing.

The device consists of a positive bus of conductive thread sewn onto a regular piece of fabric. A second piece of fabric separates this from a ground plane made of conductive fabric. The LED leads are then bent into a spiral and can easily be wrapped around the appropriate part of the conductor.

We’re happy to see this creative design coming from a hacker that frequents a hackerspace; Pumping Station One in Chicago. This would be a wonderful application for banners or flags at hackerspace events.