Review And A Build: Makey Makey, A Banana Piano, And Mario

May 25, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

We’ve been getting a lot of emails on the Hackaday tip line about the Makey Makey. This business-card sized circuit board turns everything – bananas, Play-Doh, water, and people – into a touch interface.

There have been a ton of blogs that have written about the Makey Makey Kickstarter and debut at the Bay Area Maker Faire, but Hackaday has been mum on the pending release of the Makey Makey. There’s a reason for that: [Jay] and [Eric], the MIT Media Lab rats who came up with the Makey Makey, offered to send a demo board out to somebody at Hackaday. Well, here’s the review of all the cool stuff you can make with the Makey Makey.

Continue reading “Review And A Build: Makey Makey, A Banana Piano, And Mario” →

Making Music With Radiation

May 25, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 11 Comments

[Jeff Keyser] from mightyohm.com got a chance to show off this interesting take on ambient music. He’s using his geiger counter kit to detect beta and gamma radiation. This then sends a pulse down the line to an Arduino to turn it into a musical note. The geiger counters put out a 1.ms 3v pulse though, so he first has to run this through a 74Ls04, which spits out the 5V the arduino wants. He’s admittedly no musician, but you can hear in the video it sounds fine. Especially considering they are all just C in different octaves. Those of us that are musicians probably would have gone with a B#.

The ambient noise is interesting, but when you realize it is due to radioactive decay, it becomes somehow more attention getting. We often forget about the invisible world around us. He even drops a few Uranium marbles onto the geiger counters to spice things up.

Continue reading “Making Music With Radiation” →

Classic VW Bug Stereo Gets Bluetooth

May 25, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 23 Comments

If any of you deal with older car fanatics, you’ll know that the original dash stereo is a coveted piece of equipment. If they haven’t been removed and replaced with something more modern over the years, they’re usually non functional. [Hadrien] has gone through some trouble to retain his original stereo in his 69 Volkswagen Beetle. First, he did a common hack we see even in modern cars. He added an auxiliary input.

This satiated his desire for modern audio for a while, but he really found the necessity for a cable attachment annoying. He decided he was going to add bluetooth (google translated from french). To do this, he took a pair of bluetooth headphones and tore them apart. Using an old cassette tape as the case, he rebuilt them as something that could be wired directly to his dash stereo. He even kept the mic just in case he wanted to use this as a hands free device.

Being build in 1969, his car stereo doesn’t use a cassette, so he just keeps it in the glove box. This isn’t optimal, but as he says, at least he doesn’t have to plug in his phone.

DIY Solar Collector Boost Your Hot Water System

May 24, 2012 by Mike Szczys 23 Comments

This home is heated by a wood stove in the winter, which also produces hot water. But the other three seasons it’s an electric water heater that does the work. This latest hack is a solar collector meant to take over the hot water production work for the house. it uses basic building materials and rudimentary construction skills, making it much more approachable than trying to make electricity from the sun.

It’s really just a wood box with a glass lid. The inside has been painted black, and the black tubing that snakes through it holds the water. A three-way valve lets the homeowner patch into the hot water reservoir. The collector is lower than the reservoir, so the heated water makes its way back into the tank as cooler water takes its place. Not bad for an entirely passive system!

[Thanks Minde]

Hackaday Store: It Exists Again

May 24, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 39 Comments

We used to have a store. Actually, it was just me, pumping out shirts and stickers from my garage. However, I found that over time, I wasn’t particularly happy with the quality of the shirts. The vinyl would crack over time, and I wasn’t the fastest person in the world to get an order out the door. I shut down the store because I didn’t want to too poorly in the name of hackaday. I’ve had TONS of emails asking me to turn it back on.

Today, we’re turning on another store. It isn’t fancy. It isn’t amazing. It should, however, provide higher quality products than we had before, and more different products to choose from. I’ve put shirts, coffee mugs, and stickers in so far. The graphics were all done correctly for each format, so they should turn out very nice.When you buy Hackaday merchandise, you help ensure Hackaday will stick around as long as possible.

Now, lets talk a little bit about where we should go from here.

Continue reading “Hackaday Store: It Exists Again” →

Grab Your Iron And Add GameCube Back To The Wii

May 24, 2012 by Mike Szczys 44 Comments

One of the really cool things about the Nintendo Wii when it was first introduced was the ability to play GameCube games on it. This made it a no-brainer for a lot of folks to upgrade. But as the heyday of legacy systems fades into history, Nintendo decided this was no longer a selling point and stopped populating those components. The good new is, if you don’t mind a lot of PCB soldering you can add your GameCube bits to a modern Wii motherboard.

[Deadlyfoez] launched a raffle to raise enough money to buy a new version of the hardware (we guess the raffle prize is the modded console). He then proceeded to solder on four GameCube controller ports and a memory card reader. There are also a number of passive surface mount components that need to be added. But as the video after the break shows, once in place the functionality reappears on the software side.

Continue reading “Grab Your Iron And Add GameCube Back To The Wii” →

Arduino Tells You How Rough Your Last Mountain Bike Ride Was

May 24, 2012 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

If you want to see what kind of abuse you’re causing your body when out on those single-track rides this system is just the thing. It’s an Arduino data logger that [Wdm006] takes along on the rides with him. When he gets back home, a Python scripts captures the data dump and graphs it. It may sound like a neat trick, but he’s got something planned for that information.

The enclosure mounts to the stem of his bike. It houses an Arduino board with a data logging shield of his own design. That shield holds an SD card for storage, and breaks the other pins out as screw terminals. Right now there’s an accelerometer on the front fork, and some method of recording wheel speed. This is the research phase of an anti-lock brake system (ABS) he plans to build for mountain biking. No word on what hardware he’ll use for that, but we can’t wait to see how it comes out.