Hackaday Links: Sunday, May 12th, 2013

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[Johnathan Crawford] isn’t bashful about tearing the insides of his truck apart. He’s built his own remote starter using a Raspberry Pi.

We vaguely remember hearing about a startup that planned to deliver tacos using quadcopters instead of people. We assume that company was a bust but here’s the concept in action at the 2013 RoboGames [thanks Don].

On the topic of food: pizza and joysticks… do they go together? Perhaps. Here’s a joystick made out of an empty pizza box (note the remains of grease stains inside).

[Jonathan] brings to our attention the problem of running out of fingers to press all the buttons on your Monome at just the right moment. No worries, just add some solenoids to act as extra fingers.

Apparently some Samsung cameras (NX20, NX210 and NX1000) can use their USB port as a shutter release. The trick is finding the right resistor values for the ID pin [thanks Janne].

Plagued with a tablet dock that wasn’t weighty enough to prevent the device from tipping over [John] filled base with lead to keep the thing upright.

[Helmut’s] bathroom had no windows. He faked one using an Arduino and an RGB led.

And finally, as a reward for all the readers that made it to the bottom of the article, here’s a gem of a project. [Charlie] was inspired by the recent logic combo lock post to send in his own plans for a lock he made years ago. Unfortunately he can’t find the pictures from the build but the theory behind it is quite engaging.

23 thoughts on “Hackaday Links: Sunday, May 12th, 2013

  1. you could probably get a clean pizza box from your local pizza shop they will probably give you one

    or there are other low profile boxes of similar size and shape you can use that is cleaner.

  2. Tacocopter was always a joke, not an actual business or even a proposal for one. (Search terms: “Tacocopter prank”)

    But that doesn’t mean that someone won’t deliver tacos by drone just for kicks. (Much like the “sudo make me a sandwich” bot.) Tacos were also delivered by ‘copter at last week’s Tacoconference. But again, because fun is fun, not because there’s a business there.

    1. Yeah, especially seeing the way that the tacos ended up being delivered :P

      This technology needs a lot of working on. But I guess eventually it will be feasible – after all, the blades don’t have enough mass to even cut someone last time I checked, and if some sort of AI auto-pilot was developed google car style, this could work.

      1. I think you are mistaken on that. I have a large scar on my arm from my hexcopter’s blades. I was testing indoors and forgot to disable the failsafe, so it tried to RTL straight into my ceiling fan. I grabbed it and held it down long enough to disconnect the battery, but got multiple inch+ deep cuts on my upper arm.

    2. It isn’t likely to become a business in the west, but in japan.. you never know.
      One could at least use it as some lan-party service that take place in large halls.

      1. yeah, I agree about the dementia. No doubt with it right there by the bed he just can’t resist opening up the base and rubbing the lead all over his body every night before dozing off. Maybe tasting bits of it too.

      2. Lead doesn’t magically creep out and enter your body (to put the subtle sarcasm of wernicke in more plain terms), and as long as he removes it at the end of the lifetime of the device and reuses it it’s environmentally sound too.

  3. That PB&J (Pizza box and Joystick) is about the most ghetto thing I’ve ever seen, the only way to make it cooler would be to use pepperoni slices as buttons. (But the pizza was probably gone by the time anyone would have thought of that.)

  4. I’m researching the various ways USB devices support non-USB signalling. This is the first time I’ve seen that a camera supports that kind of thing. I’m also interested in other multiplexed wired interfaces (e.g. UART over a headphone jack that also supports audio) on commercial products. If you know of any, I’d love to hear from you. Thanks! mike@ossmann.com

  5. What I am waiting for is someone to make the RaspiDrone board that is like the ArduDrone board. All the drone hardware (except the raspi can also add a camera to look at the ground for station keeping) in one board to give us military UAV level of stability in our home made drones.

    I just dont have the time to bang my own out, but I’ll gladly pay for someone elses work.

    1. Once there is a raspidrone board perhaps then someone can make an intelligent anti-drone-drone to intercept drones and knock them out of the sky.
      You just know we’ll need something like that sooner than later and I think people should be working on that.

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