Home Claw Game Delights The Little Ones

August 16, 2010 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

After seeing Toy Story [Will Gorman’s] son wanted to play the Crane Game. Rather than hanging out in the lobby of the pizza parlor, [Will] built one at home using Lego. The skill crane as he calls it has a large gantry to travel over the top of the treasure box. The claw can move side to side on the gantry, dropping for a chance at some loot once it’s in the right place. See a successful run in the video after the break and if you can’t help yourself, there’s build instructions that will have you up and running in no time. But you don’t have to build it out of Lego, sometimes you just need some junk to pull one of these together. Continue reading “Home Claw Game Delights The Little Ones” →

Robot Follows The Rules Of The Road

August 16, 2010 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6R0wO1o01g]

This is a fantastic high school project. [Shmendrik213] built and robot a programmed it to follow common traffic rules. The robot drives itself with a DC motor, using one servo for steering and another to pan a webcam back and forth. The netbook that comes along for the ride is running a VB.NET program that can detect an upcoming intersection, read the street sign, and react based on other cars currently at the intersection.

The hardware is running on an Altera processor using firmware programmed in VHDL. We remember building a tissue box holder for one of our high school projects. Looks like the times have changed since then.

Androidome: Monome For Android

August 16, 2010 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

[Ewan Hemingway] tipped us off about his new Android app, Androidome. This is the first one he’s turned out after going through our Android development tutorials. It combines an app running on his Android 2.1 device with a computer running Max/MSP 5. The two don’t needed to be tethered, they just need to be on the same wireless network. This won’t be the best solution if you’re doing live performances, as the buttons on the screen end up being quite small. But as you can see after the break, it’s a great way to get into working with the Monome interface and decide if you want to build a dedicated physical version of the tool.

Continue reading “Androidome: Monome For Android” →

GameBoy Analog Meter

August 16, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 30 Comments

Boring game.

Here’s an interesting setup using a GameBoy Advance as an interface and power supply for a PIC microprocessor. He’s got the PIC connected to the serial port of the GameBoy Advance and is able to pass and retrieve data for display on the screen. You can see above that he is showing two analog values from the pic. You can download the schematic and source code and see a few more pictures, but that’s about it.

[via HackedGadgets]

Hackaday Links: August 15, 2010

August 15, 2010 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

Creepy or not?

Do you find these faces creepy or cute? They can display a huge range of facial gestures and the German engineers who designed them were trying to avoid the uncanny valley. That’s the point at which human features on a robot seem quite real, but are off in just the right way as to cause revulsion. [Thanks Simon]

Water in your ink cartridge

Like all great hackers [Dean] digs through his neighbors’ trash. He found an inkjet printer but wanted to test it out before buying new cartridges. The old ones were dried up but he revitalized them with an injection of filtered water. It might get you through that quick printing project without a trip to Walgreen’s.

Laser-cut LP record

[Niklas Roy] demonstrates a laser-cut LP record. He’s using acrylic as a medium, kind of like a big CD with grooves in it. He’s got several tracks that are simple loops instead of the longer spirals you may be familiar with. They definitely sound different but it’s up to you to decide if that’s by design, or a fluke.

Star Wars cinema

Ever wonder what to do with those classic toys you’ve got sitting around? Here’s a little video that envisions your life with an AT-AT as the house pet. [Thanks Gabe via Wired]

Making EL Wire

August 15, 2010 by Mike Szczys 43 Comments

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

[Jeri Ellsworth] adds electroluminescent wire to the list of things she makes. The materials list is incredibly low. The common components are epoxy coated magnet wire for the center conductor and bare wire for the second conductor. The part you don’t have on hand is phosphors, although she does link to a source.

The bad news: she doesn’t show us the build process or share the details about the inductor that fires this thing up. The good news: in-depth videos are on the way. In the mean time you can marvel in her glowing success at the end of the video, or check out some of her other electroluminescent fun.

More Car Audio Input Hacking

August 15, 2010 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

[Dave] pulled the head unit out of his dashboard to add an iPod input. He took a much more invasive route than the other hack we saw a few days ago. He actually patched into the audio lines going from the Dolby reader head chip to the amplifier.

The first step was to trick the deck into thinking it had a cassette inserted. He scoped an enable pin on one of the chips to discover the timing and emulated that signal using a PIC microprocessor. From there he popped off the chip that reads the tape data, patching directly into the audio out traces. This presented some noise issues when charging the iPod but [Dave] fixed that with some decoupling capacitors.