Three Digit Binary Clock

February 20, 2011 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

Here’s a three digit binary clock that [Viktor] designed. It uses a multiplexed display to drive one digit at a time with a PIC 16F628A. The video after the break shows it ticking away, display hours, minutes, and seconds in blue LEDs. You may be wondering why those LEDs are not flush to the board? [Viktor] took the project one step further than most binary clock projects, designing a PCB to fit into the enclosure of an old laptop PSU and then having the board manufactured. With options like DorkbotPDX groups orders its has become quite inexpensive to do this and it’s really good practice for when you need to design a highly complicated board for that super-fantastic project of the future.

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Toy Helicopter Charging Fix

February 20, 2011 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

[Onefivefour] was surprised that his E-flite Blade MCX radio controlled helicopter came with a charger that used AA batteries to recharge the lithium batteries in the flying unit. Yeah, that’s a bit crazy. He set out to modify the base unit to work with AC power. There are four batteries inside this base unit, one of them powers the charge detector circuit and the others are used to juice-up the chopper’s rechargeable cells. He took a 5V regulated charger from a Motorola cellphone and modified it to interface with the contacts for the three AA cells. Like the Magic Trackpad hack, he did this without altering the holder by cutting a couple of pencils to length and attaching the positive and negative contacts from the AC charger to them. Check out the video after the break for a walk though, noting how he still has the option to go back to battery power if he so chooses.

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RF Control From Just About Any Device

February 20, 2011 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

[Mirko] is working on a library that will allow you to add RF control to just about any device. The only requirement is that the device be capable of running a Linux kernel, and that it have a few GPIO pins available. One example is fairly straight forward, a Netgear router. Many, if not most routers run a Linux kernel natively and most have solder points on the board for unused IO pins so patching into the hardware is very straight forward. Less obvious and much more impressive is the hack seen in the image above. [Mirko] built an SD card adapter cable and uses the contacts in the card reader to bit bang four-wire SPI to communicate with that RF module.

Solar-powered Junkbot

February 20, 2011 by Mike Nathan 5 Comments

solar_powered_junkbot

Instructables user [martzsam] recently built a simple robot using miscellaneous junk he found around his house. The first parts he scrounged up were a pair of 1.5v electric motors and some wire scraps, after which, he went to work on an old garden light. He detailed how to carefully remove the light’s solar panel as well as the charging circuit, which he used to power his robot. The pieces were mounted on some old erector set parts after a bit of rewiring, then the bot was set in motion. [martzsam] also mentions that he tweaked the solar panel’s charging circuit and battery to run the motors at half speed until light is shone on the panel, at which point the robot runs at full speed.

This project would be great to do with kids as it teaches the concepts of re-purposing common household items as well as allows them to use their imagination in designing a fun, yet simple robot. Gather up some old junk and your kids/nieces/nephews and get going!

Continue reading to see a quick video of the robot in action.

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Thingiverse Receives First DMCA Takedown

February 20, 2011 by Gerrit Coetzee 47 Comments

A landmark in home 3d printing was set when [Dr. Ulrich Schwanitz] sent a DMCA takedown notice to Thingiverse.com on users [artur83] and [chylld’s] takes on his Penrose triangle model. ([chylld’s] take is pictured above) While the takedown itself is highly debatable, we do think it’s cool that home 3d printing has come far enough to begin infringing on the copyrights of objects themselves. Right now media pirating has the front stage, but it’s not hard to look a little further into the crazy sci-fi universe that is our future and see a battle being fought over the rights to physical objects.

[via Thingiverse Blog]

Analog To Digital Converter Build

February 20, 2011 by Mike Nathan 13 Comments

analogue_digital_converter

[Daniel Garcia] sent us a quick tutorial he put together demonstrating how to use an ATmega168 to perform analog to digital conversions. This timely tutorial would make for a nice complimentary project for those of you who decided to build your own digital to analog converter after reading our post from a few days ago.

The ATmega168 has six pins that are typically used for digital I/O, but they can be used for analog input as well. In his example, he uses a trimpot as an analog input device, connecting it to one of the aforementioned analog pins. Its value is returned as a 16-bit number which is then displayed on the attached LCD. The LCD display and the breadboard layout used in this project are covered in his previous writeups, so be sure to give those a read through before working through this tutorial.

Power Adapter For Digital Cameras Without An External Jack

February 20, 2011 by Mike Szczys 21 Comments

[Kusnick] is into using digital camera rigs for book scanning. The problem is that keeping the batteries charged is a pain, but there’s no external AC adapter jack which would allow him to use the mains. His solution was to build his own adapter to replace the batteries.

There are some fancy book scanning setups that allow you to just flip through the pages, but it’s much simpler to build a rig that uses two cameras. [Kusnick’s] setup is the latter, which means he’s found two inexpensive cameras that don’t need to be mobile. The first attempt at making an adapter featured a block of acrylic with the positive and negative contacts connected to a shielded cord which he then hooked to an external supply. The camera would come on and then turn off citing that the cameras were “for use with compatible battery only”. Turns out there’s some type of verification circuit built into the proprietary batteries. But the solution to that came quite easily; remove the circuit board from the battery and insert it in the adapter to trick the camera.

[Thanks Daniel]