Use A 3D Mouse With Eagle CAD

October 12, 2010 by Mike Szczys 29 Comments

[Sebastian] made a 3D mouse work with Eagle CAD. He was inspired after using a 3DConnexion device to manipulate the views in a copy of Solid Edge 3D CAD modeling software. The system uses the 3D mouse in one hand with the regular mouse in the other.

It turns out that 3DConnecxion offers a lot of tools to get their devices working with your software. [Sebastian] downloaded the .NET example and modified it to read in data from the device. With the use of hot-keys he manages to get zoom, pan, and centering to work (see for yourself after the break). The only drawback to his implementation is that he can’t pan while dragging parts. But that’s just a small issue waiting for you to find a solution.

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Halloween Props: Puking Pirate

October 12, 2010 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

With everyone’s favorite free-candy holiday approaching, [Slouriesr] set to work building a vomiting ghoul for his Halloween display. He’s calling it a puking pirate and it centers around a pump and some simple plumbing fixtures.

First, the vomit receptacle was made by adding a sink drain with a pop-up stopper to the bottom of a kitty litter bucket. The drain slows the evacuation of liquid into a five gallon bucket below. In that bucket you’ll find a float switch pump used to keep water off of a pool cover. As the bucket fills up the pump turns on and empties the water through a hose ending at the ghoul’s mouth. The result is a 20-second puke cycle sure to delight the trick-or-treaters. Sure, there’s a lot of work to be done to get this guy looking the part, but what a great idea!

Help keep us in the holiday spirit by sending the details on your latest prop build.

Take Me Back To A Simpler Time, Radio Flyer

October 12, 2010 by Jakob Griffith 24 Comments

[Fred Keller] and [Judy Foster], both retired, are proving that age is just a number. What you see above is a nostalgia inducing full size driveable Radio Flyer red wagon. The base of which is a 1976 Mazda pickup truck, while the wagon portion is a mishmash of wood, fiberglass and bondo, detergent bottles, and more. Even the steering wheel has been retrofitted from an actual wheel from a wagon. We were surprised to find out the entire conversion only took the two 11 months to complete (finishing this past august), and even more confounded to learn the vehicle is completely street legal.

[Thanks Rob]

Adding Mobile Control To Your Gardening

October 11, 2010 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

[The Cheap Vegetable Gardener] wanted to check in on his garden from the road so he wrote a control app for his WinPhone. The hardware work is already done; having been built and tested for quite some time.

The implementation comes in two parts, both shown in the chart above. The grow box is behind a firewall as you don’t want random folks turning on the water and grow lights on a whim. The first part of the interface takes care of this separation by providing a set of functions on the host machine. The second portion is the phone app itself which calls those functions and displays all the pertinent information from the status of the lights, heater, exhaust, and water pump, to the current temperature and humidity. He’s even used Google Charts to graph data over time. The app itself took about two hours to code with no prior experience, a testament to the level of approachability these tools are gaining.

Embedded RFID For Online Passwords

October 11, 2010 by Mike Szczys 33 Comments

[Jair2K4] is using his unique RFID tag address as an online password. We’d bet that if you went far enough to get an implant in your hand you’d continually search for a reason to use it. Wanting to do more than just start his car with a wave of the hand, he built an interface module out of an Arduino and a Parallax RFID reader. Using a program called AAC Keys on Windows 7 he emulates a keyboard using the input from the Arduino. When it comes time to login he types his username and parks the cursor in the password box. By holding the RFID implant next the reader, the ID is dumped as the password, along with a newline (might be a carriage return, we’re not certain) character which submits the login. Take a look for yourself after the break.

On the one hand, nobody will be able to steal his tag as easily as they could steal one that is on a key ring. But we know RFID is rather notorious for a false sense of security. As long as you’re not using it for state secrets we think it’s a nice solution.

Update: After reading the comments on this feature, [Jair2K4] made some changes to his code. It now reads the tag and verifies it with stored data, then spits out whatever password you wish (making it easy to change passwords from time-to-time). He also added servo control to the sketch.

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NES Controller Gets A Rumble Pak

October 11, 2010 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

Add some feedback to an original NES controller by making it vibrate. This feature is often known as Rumble Pak, a controller add-on for the Nintendo 64 which vibrated as a game feature. This version adds a small DC motor (in the upper right) with a screw soldered off-center to the motor shaft.

[Andy Goetz] and his friend built this as a robot controller, taking advantage of the latch and clock pins. Normally, nothing happens while both pins are held high, a signal that they easily patched into using an AND gate. This is actually a neat find, as the addition of an internal microcontroller could add bi-directional communication when the latch is high and the clock is strobed.

Bicycle Hub Hydropower

October 11, 2010 by Mike Szczys 36 Comments

[Niklas Roy] wanted to create electricity from moving water so he came up with this hyrdopower generator. It is part of his grand scheme to rent out small personal fountains made from buckets. They need electricity to run so he hooked up the generator to the water jet of a public fountain. It should be possible to use this setup with falling water in a similar way that other generators do.

To build the device he cut fins out of PVC pipe to use as the scoops. They are attached to a Shimano hub generator, meant for producing power while you pedal. The hub is mounted in the front for from a bicycle, which can then be mounted anywhere moving water is available. The only thing that worries us about the setup is [Niklas’] comment that being showered with water didn’t destroy the hub right away.

See the hub and the smaller fountains in the clip after the break.

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