Building A SuperMacro Lens

June 19, 2010 by Mike Szczys 51 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW0cFk9d-P0]

[Lozzless] has a steady hand and plenty of confidence in his hacking skills. The video above is worth watching for the full eight minutes. In it you’ll see him convert a lens into what he calls a SuperMacro lens with a working aperture. The process involves fashioning a connector ring from a lens cap, modifying an Electro-focus lens mount, and assembling the parts to do his bidding. We don’t have the photography background to fully understand what he’s doing here, but we can appreciate the process, and the results are shown at the end of the clip.

[Thanks TommyC]

Coachella Lamp

June 19, 2010 by Mike Szczys 25 Comments

This little art piece might be just the thing to add that mad scientist look to your room. It’s called the Coachella lamp and it makes use of several throwback display devices. At the top an Argon discharge lamp puts out ultraviolet light. Protruding from each of the four sides you can see a set of decatrons. There’s also four Nixie tube bar graphs standing tall from each corner of the base. The final touch is the colored glow in the center which is provided by LEDs. We’ve embedded some video of the device after the break.

The lamp is powered by a wall outlet and controlled with an Arduino. We’ve seen deactrons used as timing devices and would love to see some clock functionality added to the lamp. Trying to decipher the time from the different Nixie displays would put this up there with some of those other hard to read timepieces.

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Arc Reactor Replica

June 19, 2010 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

This Arc Reactor is a great re-creation of the fictional source of Iron Man’s power. It’s really just a holder for a bunch of LED’s, but it exhibits some fine craftsmanship which we enjoy in any project. This rendition is much more true to the movie than the last look-a-like we saw. These might end up being for sale (the webpage narrative is kind of weird) but you really shouldn’t be wearing this kind of thing around unless you made it yourself, or if you can add it to some kind of Iron Man simulator.

[Thanks Cr8vie]

Nerf Sentry Turret

June 18, 2010 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

With exams behind him [Adam Greig] had time to make a Nerf sentry gun. It’s actually quite easy to pull everything together. He’s got a netbook running Motion, an open source motion sensing program for use with a webcam. When movement is detected an Arduino, connected via a USB cable, actuates a servo to pull the trigger of the gun. The turret itself has seen a battery upgrade that increases the firing speed. It’s fun to see hardware prototyping done with a few pencils and a fist full of cable ties. Check it out after the break.

This particular toy, the Nerf N-Strike Vulcan, has become quite a popular starting point for turrent projects. We’ve seen one that uses a motorized base, and another that was part of a final project at Cornell.

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Candle Stop Motion: How’s It Done?

June 18, 2010 by Mike Szczys 55 Comments

[Ollie] tipped us off about a stop motion video that uses a grid of tea candles to animate some classically pixellated game graphics. The image above is obviously a game of pong in progress. It’s interesting to watch but for us the fun is trying to decide how it’s done. Click through the break to see the video and discuss the methodology.

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Velosynth Annoys Those Around You As You Ride

June 18, 2010 by Mike Szczys 43 Comments

We’ve always put stock in ‘the quieter the better’ when it comes to road bikes. You’ll find this truth if you spend 100k on the back wheel of someone with a sqeaky rear derailleur. But apparently the folks at Effalo never learned this lesson as they’ve produced a bike computer that generates noise as you ride.

Perhaps it just takes some ingenuity to turn this into a beautiful music maker along the lines of the Force Trainer hack. No problem because the velosynth is a hackable design. The case was made with a vacuum form and inside you’ll find a bunch of small breadboards. The JeeNode, which is an Arduino/Xbee combination, serves as the heart of the device by taking speed and acceleration data from the bicycle wheel. From there it is passed on to various modules, Bob’s your uncle, and sound comes out. Check out their sales pitch after the break and if you’re starting to get some ideas about using this check out the open source info they’ve provided.

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Talking Poker Timer

June 18, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 7 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8iIuPnXzm8]

This interesting box of buttons is a talking poker tournament timer. Full of useful tools like a binary time display, words of wisdom, countdowns to the end of the game, and even good old “bicycle built for two” mode (around 1:20). While we find it fairly difficult to understand, we applaud the feature list, especially the song. He used an Arduino with a voice shield, so there’s not much to the electronics side, but you can download his source code from his site.

[via Makezine]