TV-B-Gone Can Double As A Camera Remote Control

November 3, 2011 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

[Christopher] found a way to get a bit more mileage out of his TV-B-Gone kit. The little device is intended to turn off every television in range with the push of a button. But at its core it’s really just a microcontroller connected to some infrared LEDs. Instead of sending codes to shut of televisions, you can rewrite the firmware to send a camera remote shutter release code.

It doesn’t take too much to pull this off. You need a way to flash new firmware to the device, and you need to know the new code timing that you want to send. Since the firmware is open source it’s easy enough to make code changes, and there are several easy methods of flashing AVR devices (like the tiny85 used here), including using an Arduino as an ISP.

But [Christopher] did more than just add the Nikon code for his camera. He realized that there’s a jumper to select between European or American television codes. Since he wasn’t using the foreign option, he replace that pin header with a switch that selects between normal TV-B-Gone operation and camera shutter release modes. Nice.

Bomb Disposal Robot With Lego Gripper

November 3, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 4 Comments

[Krash] had a lot of fun hacking up his Spy Gear TRAKR; we’re just lucky he was able to move a suspicious Shrek doll before it detonated.

The now discontinued Spy Gear TRAKR serves as the basis for [Krash]’s build. This tiny remote-controlled toy transmits video back to its remote and makes us very jealous of the awesome toys our nephew has. Thankfully, the engineers behind the TRAKR made it extremely hackable, as proved by Hack A Day’s very own [Phil Burgess].

[Krash] began his build by putting a few male headers in the GPIO pins on the TRAKR’s board. After that, the TRAKR SDK was downloaded. He used a few Snap Circuits to verify his TRAKR software was working, then set off to build a Lego gripper arm. The arm is powered through an H-bridge IC [Krash] found alongside the rest of his Snap Circuits stuff.

Not a bad build for what amounts to a pile of toys. Check out [Krash]’s video of his bomb disposal bot after the break.

Continue reading “Bomb Disposal Robot With Lego Gripper” →

Video: Analog To Digital Conversion On The ATmega328p

November 3, 2011 by Jack Buffington 6 Comments

In this week’s video, we continue on where we left off last week with another in our series of videos where we discuss how to program for the ATmega328p processor. This week, [Jack] takes a look at the analog to digital converter and takes us through how to set things up and then how to perform a conversion using the potentiometer on the 3pi as the analog source. Playing with potentiometers isn’t the most interesting thing in the world, but after watching this video, you will be able to do things like take light readings using a cadmium sulfide cell, read the weight applied to a sensor, calculate the temperature from a resistor and a thermistor, or interface with an analog gyroscope.

If you have missed our previous videos, here are some links:
Part 1: Setting up the development environment
Part 2: Basic I/O
Part 3: Pulse Width Modulation

Stay tuned for next week’s* video where we will take a look at how to interface with the 3pi’s line sensors.

Video is after the break…

* HAD is in the process of moving our secret headquarters so next week’s video may come some time later than next week.

Continue reading “Video: Analog To Digital Conversion On The ATmega328p” →

Halloween Hacks: A Jacob’s Lantern Sure To Win The Carving Contest

November 3, 2011 by Mike Nathan 15 Comments

Halloween Hacks Banner

jacobs-ladder-pumpkin

[Matt] entered himself in a pumpkin carving contest this year, even despite the fact that his artistic skills were a bit…lacking. He knew that he had very little chance of winning the contest unless he had a great gimmick to make his creation stand out, so he started brainstorming.

[Matt] figured that since his design would have to be somewhat simple, he needed something eye catching that he could add to the pumpkin after it went under the knife. Like a bolt of lightning, inspiration struck, and he set off to fetch an ignition transformer along with some wire coat hanger.

He built a makeshift Jacob’s ladder that would fit perfectly inside his hollowed out pumpkin, and proceeded to carve the pumpkin with the “Caution, risk of electric shock” logo, familiar to most anyone that works with electronics. You can see the final result in the video below, which we think looks pretty neat. If he didn’t end up winning the contest, we’d be shocked!

Continue reading “Halloween Hacks: A Jacob’s Lantern Sure To Win The Carving Contest” →

Making A Wall Power Adapter For A Digital Camera

November 3, 2011 by Jeremy Cook 21 Comments

Instructables user [txoof] was unhappy with the fact that Olympus didn’t manufacture a wall power adapter for the E-510 camera and decided to do something about it. The resulting new power adapter is described in this article. What it amounts to is a fake battery pack made out of plywood.

A 2.5mm DC power adapter is attached as seen in the picture above and the fake battery contacts are made with a thin brass or steel plate. According to the article, a steel soda can or bean tin works well for this. Google sketchup with the slicer plugin is used to make slices of wood to be glued together in a “battery” shape. Alternatively, something like this would be a good project for a 3D printer or CNC router.

Although there is nothing that revolutionary about this hack, it solves a problem that many people have with cameras or other electronics without a readily available wall power supply. This can be especially evident when trying to do time-lapse photography or other activities that need a long time span. For another hacked-together wooden camera project, check out this remote trigger built using plywood and air freshener components.

Interactive Digital Fireplace Is Great For Those Chilly Winter Evenings

November 3, 2011 by Mike Nathan 14 Comments

video-fireplace

We’ve all seen them – those fireplace DVDs that seem to pop up on grocery store endcaps and get traded in white elephant gift exchanges. If you don’t happen to have a fireplace in your home they might make a reasonable solution, but [Nick] from the Gadget Gangster thought it would be far better if you could create your own interactive digital fireplace instead.

Using the Gadget Gangster Propeller USB platform and ProtoPlus board, his fireplace merges various video segments together based on user input, and plays them on any TV that comes equipped with RCA jacks. The process is fairly straightforward, and involves wiring up switches along with audio and video output to the Propeller board via the ProtoPlus board. The remainder of the work is done using software, requiring the user to select and encode video segments for storage on an SD card. [Nick] does however provide a whole set of clips for download, should you want to take the quicker route.

After encoding and categorizing the video clips to coincide with the “stoke” and “add wood” user input buttons, the Propeller does the rest of the work, randomly selecting clips from the appropriate category when requested.

The result is admittedly a bit Lo-Fi, though we thinks it’s cool and prefer to call it “retro” instead. It might not be a Hi-Def fireplace recording, but it’s far nicer to snuggle up to a hand made fireplace rather than a DVD you picked up as an afterthought.

Continue reading to see a quick demo video of the digital fireplace in action.

Continue reading “Interactive Digital Fireplace Is Great For Those Chilly Winter Evenings” →

Time Twister Is An Ingenious Lego Clock

November 2, 2011 by Mike Szczys 33 Comments

Here’s an interesting take on a Lego clock, it uses rotating squares to change the orientation of the black and white tiles to display the needed number. As we see one of the digits cycling to the next number in the video after the break, a couple of different things pop into mind. This seems very much like a 1-dimensional Rubik’s Cube, and it also has a hint of a very large ePaper display. Those use magnetic fields to swivel microspheres that are black on one side and white on the other.

The timepiece, which was built by [Hans Andersson], is limited to displaying numbers only. If you think about it, each row is three pixels but you don’t need to have every combination of those pixels available in order to display the digits. Four sides provide enough room for the necessary combinations. This would not be true if you were trying to scale it up to include all alpha-numeric characters.

The tick of this thing certainly sounds interesting, huh?

Continue reading “Time Twister Is An Ingenious Lego Clock” →