Ridiculous Exerciser Becomes Useful As A Charger

November 22, 2010 by Mike Szczys 41 Comments

[Scott Nietfeld] built a charger from a Dyna-flex wrist exerciser. We hadn’t heard of a these gyroscopic devices before but once we saw the promo video (embedded after the break) we realized that this is the kind of thing that infomercials were made to sell. [Scott] knew the internals spun to fairly high RPM and figured that adding a few magnets on the inside and coils on the outside would turn this thing into a generator. Four rare-earth magnets fit the bill, with two external coils feeding a rectifier and linear regulator. Below you can see his demonstration video where he takes the orb apart, then spins it up, generating 250 mA at about 7.5 volts to drive the regulator and charge a cellphone. Not bad!

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SmartLCD Makes Video For Microcontrollers Easy

November 21, 2010 by Mike Szczys 28 Comments

[Rossum] developed a host board that makes it easy to drive a TFT screen using an inexpensive microcontroller. He’s looked around at a bunch of LCD’s that are easy to get your hands on and decided that the iPod Nano 2G screens are the right balance of performance (176×132 TFT) and low cost ($1-$5). They’re not particularly difficult to talk to, but with 22 pins they’re a bit hardware hungry.

He takes us through the signal sniffing he used to figure out the communications process. From there he harness the power of an ARM Cortex M0 processor, which he’s worked with in the past, to drive the screen. His implementation results in a driver board called the SmartLCD that takes care of the screen’s parallel protocol, power, and backlight. From there it’s just four connections and you can use a small microcontroller like the Arduino seen above with ease. See what it can do after the break.

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LED Wall And Kinect Join Forces

November 21, 2010 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

[Alex] wrote in to let us know about this Kinect controlled LED wall that was whipped up at the Tetalab hackerspace in Toulouse, France. The wall, which was built earlier in the year, uses some MAX7313 LED intensity controlling shift registers. Each gets its own board and controls the intensity of sixteen different red LEDs. They’re embedded in the wall module and covered with ping-pong balls as diffusers.

The recent activity on the project takes advantage of the Xbox Kinect. As you can see in the video after the break, they’ve used the open source Kinect drivers to capture 3D environment data, processing it into color gradients which are displayed on the Pong wall. Shouldn’t be long before they someone comes knocking on their door to install this in a dance club. We love the effect, especially because it works in a dark room and the LEDs don’t cause any interference with the video capture.

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Motion Activated Wildlife Camera (or A Spy Device)

November 21, 2010 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

Now you can capture pictures of our furry friends by building a motion activated wildlife camera. [Doug Paradis] took his Air Freshener hack and used it to trigger a camera. The white dome in the picture above is the PIR sensor from an Air Wick Freshmatic, along with a cheap keychain camera and an MSP430 microcontroller. He used one of the chips that came with the TI Launchpad, a transistor, and some discreet components to interface the devices and then put them into a project box. Now he’s got a fully configurable motion-sensing camera.

Adding Pan And Tilt To A Webcam

November 21, 2010 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

[Brent] and his wife wanted a way to provide more family time for Grandparents that lived far away. They tried a webcam, but their daughter just didn’t oblige by staying in the frame. Instead of chasing her around the room with with the camera he added pan and tilt features to the device. He settled on IR control using a common television remote, similar to our USB remote control receiver tutorial except that it drives servo motors instead of forwarding signals over the serial connection. [Brent] used a Picaxe 08M, connecting two servos together as a base on top of the project box. If you try this yourself there’s a lot of room to grow. Once you’ve assembled the hardware it wouldn’t be too hard to make this web enabled so that Grandpa can click on a web interface to look around the room.

Retro Adapter For Canon SLR

November 20, 2010 by Chris Nelson 19 Comments

[calculon] was able to modify a “dumb” adapter to allow his Canon SLR to use the aperture and focus on a retro lens. With his new flip mounted wide angle lens he was able to achieve some pretty neat macro shots. By cutting away some of the cheaper ring he was able to feed the wire through and glue it onto the the cameras contact points. The wire was then attached to the inputs on the “new” lens. With a new adapter running about $375 not only was this a neat little hack but it was also a money saver. You can see some more of his photos on his flicker

Beginner Concepts: Powering Your Projects

November 20, 2010 by Chris Nelson 44 Comments

Powering your gadgets generally seems like a necessary evil. To help with this [Felipe La Rotta] made a really nice bench power supply using a PC power supply and a LM317 adjustable voltage regulator. PC power supplies are an example of a switched power supply(more on that later). The LM317 is a type of linear voltage regulator that allows for adjusting the output voltage by varying some resistors. Whats the best way to power your circuits? well that depends…

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