Author: Brian Benchoff

5252 Articles

Persistence Of Vision Helicopter Blades With RGB LEDs

August 12, 2011 by 17 Comments

A user named [BOcnc] on the rcgroups forums just posted his RGB POV helicopter blades.

The two blades are attached to the heli just as any other whirlygig. The electronics, though, are mounted underneath the blade with a battery pack. We covered a build last year that demonstrated weight added to a spinning blade won’t tear everything apart, but that build used only blue LEDs. This build is full color and makes us feel like we’re living in a cyberpunk future populated by Recognizers and Daft Punk.

The images are stored on an SD card that receives data from a USB port. The microcontroller is a PIC32, and from what we can assume from the schematics, the RPM of the blades is measured by an on-board hall effect sensor (don’t quote us on that, though). There’s no hope of a commercial release from [BOcnc], though. He can’t find anyone to manufacture the blades, and the entire build was too expensive. It sure looks pretty though, so check out the video of it after the break.

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Portal Puppet Probably Won’t Kill Us

August 11, 2011 by 11 Comments

This incredibly detailed puppet of the Wheatley from Portal was sent into us, and we a so very happy that we’re not writing about a GLaDOS build right now.

Hewn from florist foam and covered Wonderflex and Apoxie Sculpt, Wheatley pretty much tows the line as far as cosplay and prop builds go. What makes Wheatley interesting is his movement mechanism – he’s actually a hand-controlled puppet. Portal quotes come a small sound module that plays 10 Wheatley quotes. The control system has ten buttons and allows for the display of a lot more emotion than we would expect from a talking sphere. We really like the completely manual solution to an articulated robot eyeball – a really great, simple solution to a complex problem.

Like the portal turret and the adorable and friendly companion cube, we’re really impressed with the build quality of Wheatley. Yet again we’re left wondering why Valve doesn’t license some awesome toys like their office sentry.

Check out the intelligence dampening sphere in action after the break.

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Adding A MIDI Input To A Game Boy

August 11, 2011 by 21 Comments

[Sprite_tm] is back again, and his work never fails to impress. His latest project is a Game Boy Advance MIDI synth that takes MIDI data from a keyboard or sequencer and maps that to Game Boy sound channels.

Because he seems to never do anything the normal way, [Sprite_tm] decided to run the Game Boy without a cartridge. We’ve seen this before; the GBA boots into the synth software over the link cable with multibooting.

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Play-by-play Of A High Altitude Balloon Flight

August 9, 2011 by 16 Comments

[Greg Intermaggio] and [Shumit DasGupta] at Techsplosion launched a high altitude balloon last week that climbed to 90,000 feet above sea level somewhere over California. The play-by-play of the flight is one of the better stories we’ve seen on high altitude balloon builds.

The balloon, christened VGER-1, carried a SPOT satellite GPS messanger to send telemetry back to the ground. We’ve seen a few home brew balloon tracking devices, but [Greg] decided to use an off-the-shelf solution for the sake of simplicity. Like other balloons the VGER-1 carried a CanonPowershot camera with CHDK firmware.

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God’s Own Keyboard, Now With Bluetooth

August 9, 2011 by 49 Comments

For decades a thunderous roar rose from the bowels of IBM keyboards like the animus of angry and forgotten gods. These keyboards have fallen silent of late, due only to incompatibility with newer hardware. Now, Model Ms have been given a reprieve from landfills or recycling centers because of the work of [wulax] of geekhack and his Model M Bluetooth controller board.

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Hacking QR Codes For Fun And Profit

August 9, 2011 by 45 Comments

QR codes are everywhere these days, from being printed onto receipts to chiseled into granite tombstones. [Will] came up with a way to modify existing QR codes, and his hack has the potential to cause quite a bit of harmless mischief.

[Will]’s hack involves a little photo editing, transparency film, and some white-out/Liquid Paper/Tippex. After the ‘target’ and ‘destination’ QR codes have been imported into Gimp, the differences are found and the result printed out on a transparency sheet. After that,  hang the transparency over the original and the QR code now goes to the URL of your choice.

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