Fubarino Contest: A Sculpted Room With LEDs

December 24, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 7 Comments

[Sisam] and [Mclien] are a father and son team that built this sculptural room with an organic looking built-in seating area and sculpted lamp shades. When you have a room that looks this cool, the only option you have is to fill it with RGB LEDs, and it just so happens their light controller has a great Hackaday Easter egg.

The room lighting is provided by a Shifty VU shield, OctoBar LED controller, and a few of these RGB LED modules. All pretty standard for an RGB LED project, but where this contest submission really shines is the controller for all the room lights. It has three sliders for the red, green, and blue channels, beefy toggle switches for each light location, an LCD for showing the program mode, a rotary switch, and push buttons for cycling through stored setups.

The Easter egg for this project comes into play whenever the color value of the lights is set to Hackaday green, #00c100. When that happens, the Hackaday URL is displayed on the controller’s display.

Awesome work, and a really cool-looking room. We wouldn’t mind a tutorial on how you sculpted it, [Sisam].

This is an entry in the Fubarino Contest for a chance at one of the 20 Fubarino SD boards which Microchip has put up as prizes!

Fubarino Contest: A Really, Really Old Plotter

December 24, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 9 Comments

DCF 1.0

Decades ago, [Vegipete] found an old drum plotter at a university used equipment sale. This plotter was old in the 80s, so like any great tinkerer, [Vegi] reverse engineered the plotter’s circuitry and got it working with his Apple ][.

The years went by, dust accumulated, and in 2010 [Vegipete] found himself doing some work with linear acceleration on a PIC microcontroller. Remembering his old plotter, [Vegi] realized he could build an embedded version of his old Apple ][ circuit. He built a circuit that turned the plotter into something that can be controlled with an FTDI adapter. A small update to the code added the an Easter egg. When the Konami code is entered on the plotter’s buttons it responds in the spirit of our Fubarino contest.

This is an entry in the Fubarino Contest for a chance at one of the 20 Fubarino SD boards which Microchip has put up as prizes!

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3DMonstr Printer: 8 Cubic Feet Of Build Volume

December 24, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 21 Comments

3D Monster

So you’re looking at 3D printers, but the build volumes for the current offerings just aren’t where you’d like them to be. [Ben Reylblat] had the same problem and came up with the 3DMonstr, an enormous printer that has (in its biggest configuration) a two foot cubed build volume, four extruders, and the mechanical design to make everything work.

Most of the ginormous 3D printers we’ve seen are basically upgraded versions of the common table-top sided models. This huge Ultimaker copy uses the same rods as its smaller cousin, and LeBigRap also uses woefully undersized parts. The 3DMonstr isn’t a copy of smaller machines, and instead uses very big motors for each axis, ball screws, and a proper welded frame. It’s highly doubtful anyone will call this printer a wobblebot.

The 3DMonstr comes in three sizes: 12 inches cubed, 18 inches cubed, and 24 inches cubed, with options for two to four extruders. We caught up with the 3D Monstr team at the NYC Maker Faire, and from first impressions we have to say this printer is freakin’ huge and impeccably designed.

Holograms With The New Kinect

December 23, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 10 Comments

kinect

The Xbox One is out, along with a new Kinect sensor, and this time around Microsoft didn’t waste any time making this 3D vision sensor available for Windows. [programming4fun] got his hands on the new Kinect v2 sensor and started work on a capture system to import anything into a virtual environment.

We’ve seen [programming4fun]’s work before with an extremely odd and original build that turns any display into a 3D display with the help of a Kinect v1 sensor. This time around, [programming] isn’t just using a Kinect to display a 3D object, he’s also using a Kinect to capture 3D data.

[programming] captured himself playing a few chords on a guitar with the new Kinect v2 sensor. This was saved to a custom file format that can be played back in the Unity engine. With the help of a Kinect v1, [programming4fun] can pan and tilt around this virtual model simply by moving his head.

If that’s not enough, [programming] has also included support for the Oculus Rift, turning the Unity-based virtual copy of himself into something he can interact with in a video game.

As far as we can tell, this is the first build on Hackaday using the new Kinect sensor. We asked what everyone was going to do with this new improved hardware, and from [programming]’s demo, it seems like there’s still a lot of unexplored potential with the new Xbox One spybox.

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Fubarino Contest: The Problem Of Being Very Good At Foosball

December 22, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 4 Comments

hachaoay [Sebastian] works at an engineering company testing car ECUs, head units, and all the confusing wiring harnesses found in the modern-day automobile. It’s good work, but not exactly fun, so [Sebastian]’s bosses bought a foosball table so the employees could unwind. The foosball tables have been there for several years, and now everyone at the company is really, really good at twirling little football players on a stick. With their current rule set (at least 6 goals and 2 goals ahead), matches last at least twenty minutes.

[Sebastian] came up with a solution to this problem: a KickerClock – something between a chess clock and an automated score keeper for foosball. The device has two seven-segment displays for each team, and a countdown timer for both of the four and a half minute rounds. All the documentation is up in [Sebastian]’s Google Drive, and he plans on adding a few neat features such as automated score keeping.

The easter egg for this submission? The buttons for scoring each goal are used as combination lock. By scoring eight black team goals (H=8), one silver team goal (A=1), three black goals (C=3), and eleven silver goals (K=11), the Hackaday URL shows up on the seven-segment displays. Extremely well hidden, and a great way to efficiently waste time at work.

Video of the KickerClock, and the easter egg, available below.

This is an entry in the Fubarino Contest for a chance at one of the 20 Fubarino SD boards which Microchip has put up as prizes!

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3D Printering: Making A Thing In AutoCAD, Part II

December 22, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 18 Comments

It’s time once again for another part in 3D Printering’s series of Making A Thing. Last week was a short tutorial on the beginnings of making a thing in AutoCAD. This is an extremely complex software package, and in a desire to make things short and sweet, I broke this AutoCAD tutorial into two parts.

Since we already covered the 2D design portion of AutoCAD, part II of this tutorial is going to turn our 2D part into a three-dimensional object. Check out the rest of the tutorial below.

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Fubarino Contest: Minecraft, Zelda, Arduinos, And Hackaday

December 22, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

song

In a clever bit of pandering to the gamer crowd for the Fubarino Contest, [Laurens] has combined The Legend of Zelda, Minecraft, and an Arduino to create something really, really cool.

[Laurens] cobbled together an Arduino, MIDI connector, and LCD display that will read a MIDI keyboard and detect when one of the songs from Ocarina of Time/Majora’s Mask is played. The Arduino then plays back the song slower and longer, just like in the game.

Here’s where things get cool: Since [Laurens] has an Arduino that knows when an OoT/MM song is played, he can have the Sun Song control the lights, or the Song of Storms turn his sprinkler system on. He chose to pipe all these commands into Minecraft, where the Song of Healing gives some health to the Minecraft character, the Song of Storms controls the rain, and other awesome mashups of Zelda and Minecraft.

This project offers more than enough to stand on its own, but [Laurens] also added a Hackaday easter egg. When playing the letters HAD in ASCII on the keyboard, our favorite URL shows up on the Arduino and inside Minecraft.

Here’s an image gallery and the source code (dropbox, so don’t spam it) for [Laurens]’ awesome project.

This is an entry in the Fubarino Contest for a chance at one of the 20 Fubarino SD boards which Microchip has put up as prizes!

Continue reading “Fubarino Contest: Minecraft, Zelda, Arduinos, And Hackaday” →