Day: August 17, 2014

Voice Controlled RGB LED Lamp

August 17, 2014 by 2 Comments

Voice Controlled Lamp

[Saurabh] wanted a quick project to demonstrate how easy it can be to build devices that are voice controlled. His latest Instructable does just that using an Arduino and Visual Basic .Net.

[Saurabh] decided to build a voice controlled lamp. He knew he wanted it to change colors as well as be energy-efficient. It also had to be easy to control. The obvious choice was to use an RGB LED. The LED on its own wouldn’t be very interesting. He needed something to diffuse the light, like a lampshade. [Saurabh] decided to start with an empty glass jar. He filled the jar with gel wax, which provides a nice surface to diffuse the light.

The RGB LED was mounted underneath the jar’s screw-on cover. [Saurabh] soldered a 220 ohm current limiting resistor to each of the three anodes of the LED. A hole was drilled in the cap so he’d have a place to run the wires. The LED was then hooked up to an Arduino Leonardo.

The Arduino sketch has several built-in functions to set all of the colors, and also fade. [Saurabh] then wrote a control interface using Visual Basic .Net. The interface allows you to directly manipulate the lamp, but it also has built-in voice recognition functionality. This allows [Saurabh] to use his voice to change the color of the lamp, turn it off, or initiate a fading routing. You can watch a video demonstration of the voice controls below. Continue reading “Voice Controlled RGB LED Lamp” →

Pool Cleaning Robot Rebuild Works Like A 3 Dimensional Roomba

August 17, 2014 by 26 Comments

Pool Cleaning Robot

Pools are great – Cleaning them, not so much. [Davide Gironi] had a pool cleaning robot, but years of working in a chlorine environment resulted in one of its gaskets failing, destroying the electronics inside. Instead of replacing it, he decided to try his hand at rebuilding it using an AVR ATmega8 microcontroller.

But wait! Wasn’t there a warranty? Expired. Couldn’t he just get a new board from the manufacturer? Costs almost as much as a new robot – time to open it up!

He’s broken the project into two parts, the out of water timer circuitry, and the robot itself. The timer is responsible for converting 220VAC to low voltage DC for the robot, and for turning it on and off based on a schedule (duh). He’s using an ATmega8 based countdown programmable timer which he designed himself for a previous project.

Continue reading “Pool Cleaning Robot Rebuild Works Like A 3 Dimensional Roomba” →

Hackaday Links: August 17, 2014

August 17, 2014 by 29 Comments

hackaday-links-chain

[wjlafrance] recently picked up an old NeXTstation, complete with keyboard, mouse, display… and no display cable. The NeXT boxes had one of the weirder D-sub connectors a still weird DB-19 video connector, meaning [wjla] would have to roll his own. It’s basically just modifying a pair of DB-25 connectors with a dremel, but it works. Here’s the flickr set.

The guys at Flite Test put on a their first annual Flite Fest last month – an RC fly-in in the middle of Ohio – and they’re finally getting around to putting up the recap videos. +1 for using wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube men as an obstacle course.

My phone’s battery is dead and my water pressure is too high.

Stripboard drawing paper, written in [; \LaTeX ;].

Remember the Commodore 16? [Dave] stuck a PicoITX mother board in one. He used the Keyrah interface to get the original keyboard working with USB. While we’re not too keen on sacrificing old computers to build a PC, it is a C16 (sorry [Bil]), and the end result is very, very clean.

A Chromecast picture frame. [philenotfound] had a 17″ LCD panel from an old Powerbook, and with a $30 LVDS to HDMI adapter, he made a pretty classy Chromecast picture frame.

 

Dampen Workshop Noise With Paper Pulp And Kool-Aid — OH YEAH!

August 17, 2014 by 82 Comments

noise dampener

If you’re fortunate enough to have a garage and a workshop, you probably also have neighbors. The truly blessed must work within the confines of an HOA that restricts noise, porch couches, and most types of fun. [Mike] is among the truly blessed, and when he decided to design a cabinet for his CNC equipment, he took noise dampening into consideration.

[Mike]’s design isn’t a blanket noise dampener; it’s specifically designed for the high-pitch symphony of his router, compressor, and vacuum. He also sought to avoid vibrating the cabinet. To achieve this, the sound-dampening panels are hung on eye hooks with a 1/2″ gap between them and the frame. The backer boards are cut from 3/4″ plywood. [Mike] considered using cement board, but thought it might be overkill since he plants to shell the cabinet in a layer of 3/4″ plywood.

The deadening material is paper pulp made from various shredded papers. After soaking the shreds in water and blending the mixture to an oatmeal consistency, he drained most of the water through a cloth bag. Then he added just enough wood glue to hold the pulpy goo together. The tropical punch Kool-Aid powder isn’t just for looks; it provides visual confirmation of even glue distribution.

[Mike] made some tape walls around the edge of his backer boards to hold the mixture in place and painted on some wood glue to hold the pulp. He spread the tropical concoction to 1/2″ thickness with a tiling trowel to avoid compressing it. The peaks and valleys help scatter any sound that isn’t absorbed. Pudding awaits you after the jump.

Continue reading “Dampen Workshop Noise With Paper Pulp And Kool-Aid — OH YEAH!” →

Real Life GTA? Driving A Car In Third Person Is Hard!

August 17, 2014 by 23 Comments

Can you drive a car in third person?

Do you fancy yourself an excellent driver in video games featuring a third person view for the driving experience? Ever wonder what it’d be like in real life? [Tom] and [Oli] wanted to find out so they decided to setup this awesome experiment.

They’re using the Bovingdon airfield, which was a Royal Air Force station during WWII — today it stands empty and is a beloved testing ground for many custom vehicles in the UK, like [Colin Furze’s] world record-setting baby carriage. The car chosen for the challenge is a Mazda MX-5 Miata, which we don’t think they care too much about considering the potential obstacles they’ll be hitting!

The driver wears a set of video goggles, and a co-pilot comes along for the ride to help prevent any major collisions. A hexrotor drone is flown by another person who attempts to keep it mostly behind the car in the stereotypical third person view. The video signal is then transmitted down to the driver in real time.

Continue reading “Real Life GTA? Driving A Car In Third Person Is Hard!” →

DEFCON 22: The HackRF PortaPack

August 17, 2014 by 12 Comments

What do you get when you combine one of the best (and certainly one of the best for the price) software defined radios with the user interface of a 10-year-old iPod? The HackRF PortaPack, developed by [Jared Boone], and demonstrated at DEFCON last weekend.

[Jared] is one of the original developers for the HackRF, a 10MHz to 6GHz software defined radio that can also transmit in half duplex. Since the development of the HackRF has (somewhat) wrapped up, [Jared] has been working on the PortaPack, an add-on for the HackRF that turns it into a portable, ARM Cortex M4-powered software defined radio. No, it’s not as powerful as a full computer running GNU Radio, but it does have the capability to listen in on a surprising amount of radio signals.

Because [Jared] is using a fairly low-power micro for the PortaPack, there’s a lot of tricks he’s using to get everything running smoothly. He gave a lightning talk at the Wireless Village at DEFCON going over the strengths and weaknesses of the chip he’s using, and surprisingly he’s using very little floating point arithmetic in his code. You can check out the video for that talk below.

Continue reading “DEFCON 22: The HackRF PortaPack” →

Robotic Scalextrics

August 17, 2014 by 10 Comments

scalectrics

At the Volkswagen factory there are two towers – AutoTürme – filled with gigantic robots lifting cars into parking spaces. It’s by far the most efficient way of putting a huge number of cars in a small footprint. Slot cars exist, so how about a completely overwrought yet entirely awesome robotic parking garage for 1:32 scale cars? (.es, Google translatrix)

The project is built around several ‘racks’ to hold cars arranged around a central elevator. An Arduino takes care of moving all the motors and reading all the sensors, with the basic idea behind the project being the ability to select a car and have it appear in the pit of the track a few moments later.

Although this is just one small part of what is already a very impressive slot car track, it is however the most electronic. Other unique additions include a very unique cantilever/suspension bridge and the usual modeling techniques of creating a landscape with little more than cardboard and glue.

The best way to get a sense of how cool the parking garage is through the video. You can check that out below.

Continue reading “Robotic Scalextrics” →