Beer Fridge Holds IPad Hostage

A hackathon by the engineers over at Yelp produced this iPad-centric beer fridge. A thirsty dude bellies up to the contraption, swipes his or her RFID card, then dispenses a glass of frothy goodness. The iPad display shows information about what’s on tap, and allows you to give it a rating. This is based on kegbot but it has a few extra tricks. Instead of measuring how much beer is left via weight, this version uses a flow sensor on the beer lines. Temperature data is recorded from an analog sensor affixed to the keg itself, and the whole shebang is pulled together via an Arduino connected to the serial port of the iPad. You can even check on the keg over the Internet. See for yourself after the break.

Continue reading “Beer Fridge Holds IPad Hostage”

Adding An Input To An Old Head Unit

Tape decks in cars? Yes, that used to be quite common before optical media took over road. [Nirav Patel’s] 2004 Toyota Corolla had a deck that he used with a tape adapter in order to listen to music from his iPhone. But one day something happened and, although the adapter still worked, the cassette player started making distracting noises. [Nirav] set out to quiet the noise and install an auxiliary audio input for the sound system. There were some tripping points along the way, like breaking everything and starting a small fire, but perseverance got him to his goal. Because these units are built with compatibility for things like CD changers they have a communications bus called AVC-Lan. This protocol has been sniffed out and documented, and [Nirav] even found an existing audio-input hack that he based his design around. Now he’s able to plug directly into the dash and ditch the cassette adapter.

We’ve seen [Nirav’s] work a few times before. He’s shown us a first person shooter controller and his site was a resource in our Launchpad programming with Linux post.

[via Make]

Airsoft Minigun Packs Quite A Punch

[Kuba_T1000] built a multi-barrell Airsoft minigun with an unbelievable firing rate and an almost inexhaustible ammo pack. The gun is made entirely from aluminum which meant some time on the CNC machine. The six barrels don’t rotate but they are all used, resulting in the carnage shown in the video after the break. That large box you see is the ammo pack, which can hold 16,000 BBs and uses an electric feed system to reach the necessary delivery speeds. It is certainly not something you’d want to run into as part of an automated turret.

Continue reading “Airsoft Minigun Packs Quite A Punch”

One-handed GameCube Controller

[Hasse] built a one-handed video game controller for his brother. He fit everything he needed into the body of an existing controller and came up with a very usable system. The controller will be right-hand only, so the left shoulder button was moved underneath the right side where your middle finger can get at it. This leaves the d-pad and the left analog stick to account for. By combining an ATtiny44A, an accelerometer, and a digital to analog converter the controller can sense motion. The microcontroller reads in the accelerometer data, gives user feedback via four added LEDs on the d-pad, and the DAC feeds the appropriate signals back into the controller as if you were using the stick. There is even a switch to select whether the motion data is mapped to the analog stick or to the d-pad. We’ve included a demo video after the break.

Find that you also need some one-armed typing assistance? Check out this half-qwerty keyboard hack. Continue reading “One-handed GameCube Controller”

How-to: Launchpad Programming With Linux

When TI released their Launchpad development board at the end of June it generated a lot of Buzz. Here’s a package that delivered a programmer, debugger, two microcontrollers, and some accessories for less than five bucks (including shipping). They even provided a choice of two software suites but only for users running Windows who don’t mind proprietary software. If you’re looking to go another way you should consider trying out the open source alternative MSPGCC. After the break we’ll take a look at getting the tool-chain up and running in a Linux environment.

Continue reading “How-to: Launchpad Programming With Linux”

DroidX Gets A Custom Recovery Image

[Birdman] has managed to push a custom recovery image to the DroidX. This previously impossible action opens the doors to all kinds of fun hacking. While you can’t just drop a custom Rom on the phone right now, this is the first step in making that happen. You can find the directions in the post, but they’ve got a while to go before they become as easy as something like a jailbreak.

[via phandroid]

MSP430 Based Single LED Clock

[Kenneth Finnegan’s] latest clock makes use of the TI Launchpad for programming and debugging MSP430 microprocessors. We took a look at the Launchpad when it was released and we’re glad to see some hacks resulting from availability of that tool. The clock reads out the time using a bi-color LED. Press the button and a series of flashes will tell you the time. A three-position toggle switch is used along with the push button for setting the time. The protocol he developed is outlined in his demo video after the break.

We like [Kenneth’s] use of a plastic electrical box as a project box. They’re cheap and you can find them everywhere in many different sizes. He mentions the difficulty in drilling through the faceplate. We’ve had our share of shattered plastic trying to drill holes in the darn things. If you’ve got some tips on faceplate-modification we’d love to hear them.

This clock is sure the polar opposite from the TTL clock that [Kenneth] showed us back in March, trading jumper wires for lines of code. We’re going to give this one a try, hopefully fixing the button debounce along the way.

Continue reading “MSP430 Based Single LED Clock”