FAT Support For Any Microcontroller

February 7, 2010 by Mike Szczys 24 Comments

[Rahul Sapre] sent us a guide to porting EFSL to any microcontroller (PDF). The Embedded Filesystems Library adds FAT support to C compiled microcontrollers. It is targeted at the AVR line of chips but can be adapted to any architecture that works with a C compiler. [Rahul’s] guide will take you through the process of adapting the latest stable 0.2.8 version to new hardware by using a PIC uC as the working example. The non-stable development branch of EFSL is working toward multiple-platform support so consider lending a hand if this interests you.

Hackaday Links: February 7, 2010

February 7, 2010 by Mike Szczys 14 Comments

Bot gives head to passersby

This free range robot was spotted at this year’s Kinetica Art Fair. You can place your hand above it and it will stop and pour you a beer. That’s if you consider 7/8 of a glass of head ‘a beer’.

Photo booth adds fun – consumes floor space

Face it, photo booths are fun, and if they’re free a lot of people will use them. This particular booth was built in some guy’s apartment, adding the fun but eating up floor space. But this would be a great build for your next group gathering, just like the Crushtoberfest. [via DVICE]

More human through-hole design

[Fridgehead] stuck and 5mm LED in his earlobe and then used a microcontroller to make it pulse. He’s got quite a mop and that’s where he hides the black controller pack. The next version should be RGB and the smallest surface mount packages he can solder. At least this isn’t disgusting like the LED nipple ring.

Chandelier your wife will never let you install

This 300 LED chandelier uses epoxy coated wires draped around the light ring to resemble a more traditional crystal light fixture. It’ll still be a hard sell if you want to hang this over the dinner table. [via Gizmodo]

A touch of copper

[Zombie84] built a prototype of a robot arm out of copper pipe. There’s not much info here, but you can see some wires in the wrist that appear to function as tendons. This reminds us of the characters from 9.

Putting On A Show In The Rain

February 7, 2010 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

Let’s face it, walking around in the rain sucks. [Matth3w] is trying to add a little whimsy to an unpleasant experience by adding an LED matrix to his umbrella. The array contains 80 LEDs that are individually addressable. This is a mutiplexed array that relies on a MIC2981 source driver for the eight rows (or rings in this case), with the ten columns handled by the Arduino. The effect is quite nice as you can see in the video after the break. Now that he’s proven this works, you might want to etch your own PCB in order to get rid of the Arduino board and prototyping shield, making it easier to waterproof the control circuitry. This would make a nice addition to your illuminated umbrella stock.

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Performance Oddities

February 7, 2010 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

[Mario the Magician] wrote in to let us know that he makes Hackaday a priority every morning with his coffee. Well, so do we. He also included a link to his homepage when submitting this revelation. The juicy details that are as much of a fix as the caffeine in the coffee are missing from his posts. But the hacks are solid.

Magicians are hackers. If you could go out and buy the props, the concept are unlikely to impress anyone. [Mario] demonstrates his Nickel Box and a Jedi Mind Trick he built. The Nickel Box is a mechanical contraption that somehow transports a coin from one part of a cigar box to a tiny little enclosure on top of it. The Jedi Mind Trick uses a microcontroller and an old Star Wars soundtrack cassette tape box to put on a light and sound show while it recovers your chosen card from a shuffled deck. Great demonstrations, but no word on what’s going on inside.

[Mario’s] also has a collection of… performance oddities. His talking television takes an audio input and displays a 1950’s-esque oscilloscope effect on an old TV. He’s attempting to stop his heart, or burn the house down, or both with a flyback transformer lightning box. And his drawing automaton, well, you’ll just have to see it.

We believe in electrons, not magic (even though some say there are no electrons). So we want to know how those magic props are built. Like any good magician, [Mario] probably won’t reveal his secrets. If you’ve got the goods this your chance. Write a post detailing your magical prop builds and send them our way. If it’s well done we’ll feature it here on Hackaday.

ExoPC Shows Off Some Guts

February 7, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 10 Comments

The folks over at Engadget have posted some pictures of the ExoPC’s insides. With the recent return of the tablet craze (remember xp tablet edition?) we’re seeing tablets everywhere. This one has some promise on the hardware side, sporting a 1.6GHz processor and 2GB of RAM. Unfortunately we’ve heard using solely a tablet interface with windows7 is somewhat cumbersome even with the built in improvements. We’re not too worried though, a customized appliance style linux interface probably won’t be too far off.

The last couple times we mentioned tablet style computing, people have emailed us about the Touchbook. It also seems pretty cool, but seems like switching applications is visibly laggy in the demo video. Then again, a slimmed down interface might reduce some of that drag.

Altoids Upstaged By Gift Card Tins

February 7, 2010 by Phil Burgess 27 Comments

Nothing Earth-shattering here. Just, dare we say it, really cute!

The venerable Altoids mint tin has become an icon of the maker culture. Browsing through past articles on Hack a Day, Adafruit or Instructables, you’ll find project after project for which these pocket-sized enclosures provided just the right fit. Eminently practical, affordable, but the aesthetics have occasionally left something to be desired.

We recently stumbled upon these nifty gift card holders that resemble miniature versions of current-generation game consoles. They might be the perfect housing for your next microcontroller project…

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