Single Tube Nixie Clock

September 3, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 20 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-7QAWshEXo]

This single tube nixie clock cought our eye today. After receiving an IN-8 tube from a friend, [Trax] wanted to find some project to show it off. He decided on an art piece that doubles as a clock. Tastefully mounted in a simple wooden box with a pretty inlay, the tube is lit from below with a green LED that pulses every second. A single button, located on the back, out of view is pressed to request the time. You can see the time being displayed on the video above. To see the guts and read about how he’s using the PIC16F84’s built in clock to keep track of time, check out his site. Even though this is a Nixie, it reminds us of the Decatron kitchen timer we saw recently.

[via Hacked Gadgets]

Real Time Searching

September 2, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 5 Comments

With the fresh competition of Bing, we are reminded that search engines haven’t changed much since Google came along. Bing has made some nice advancements, like video previews, but still has a way to go to be truly different than Google. [Long]put together this prototype of a real time search system based off of Bings API. He was inspired by Google Wave which we hope to see soon. Wave is primarily for communication, redefining how email and messaging would work. We can’t help but think that Google probably has some cool stuff in the secret vaults for searching too. [Long]’s project seems like a decent start, but like the goodtimes.searchengine, we think it needs some work. What happened to the cool video previews? More importantly, why can’t we turn off the parental filter?

Peggy-zilla

September 2, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 6 Comments

peggyzilla (Custom)

For some, a peggy 2.0 is pretty cool, but simply not impressive enough. [MonsieurBon] felt this way and simply built a larger LED rig for his peggy2.0. It still uses the brains of the peggy, but the LED array is a custom built cabinet, using ping pong balls as diffusers. Another interesting modification is that they added a midi port to the setup to generate music based on what LEDs are lit. They say it creates some nice background generative music during the game of life. You can see a video of the system in action after the break.

It looks like they weren’t the only ones with this idea. The u:moon project is very similar, meant to be hung from a balloon. There seems to be an issue with the gallery on his page though, so you might want to go to his picasa gallery.

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Arduino + Hang Man = Hangmanduino

September 1, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 15 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCa8F8fbHLQ]

We saw this nifty little toy today and thought you guys might get a kick out of it. Its called the Hangmanduino, and as you can probably tell from the name, it plays hang man. This was an exercise in simplicity, you’ll notice there is only a single control for the entire game. We thought that the design was pretty cool, especially the single control. We weren’t surprised to see that this is actually the very same control we featured previously. You can download the code yourself from his website, if you want to make one of your own.

[via Flickr]

Hacking DMM Tweezers

August 31, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 8 Comments

_smart_tweezers_Calibration_Pot

These Tweezers are pretty cool tools for anyone doing SMD components. We tried them out and found them very pleasant well made. They are able to identify components and take readings easily with one hand. One thing they are missing, however, is the ability to measure voltage. The people over at Openschemes decided to see if there was a way around that. As it turns out, the chip used in the unit already has the capability to measure voltage. They take us through the process of modding the unit to be able to take advantage of this un utilized feature. From the outside, the only difference is a new switch to set the mode to voltage. Great job guys.

[via Hacked Gadgets]

Gameboy Foot Controller

August 31, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 12 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQdqudTzyBs]

[Joey] sent us a link to the newest version of his Gameboy foot controller. In the video above, you can see how he uses it to control the loops in the background while he plays his guitar through an 8-bit filter. That is an old video, using the previous version. He tells us that several gameboys were used in the construction. At one point, he had to replace the guts because the music was so loud it knocked his equipment over and destroyed it. We can’t help but feel just a tiny bit of excitement as memories of renting a NES cartridge for the weekend fill our heads when we hear these riffs. His music isn’t too bad either. There is a growing crowd of people that support “chip music”. You can see what looks like a decent sized gathering enjoying a show with a little bit of a history lesson after the break.

[This video, and the original version of the controler were posted about a year ago, good catch commenters]

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Arduino + Augmented Reality

August 28, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 23 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxr8oaRUq6k]

In this video you can see the marriage of Arduino data collecting units and Augmented reality systems. Set up by the people at pachube.com, a site for sharing sensor information from your location, this is an interesting idea. We can see that each unit has its own pattern, so it can have the data it is collecting superimposed on it in 3d. While this is really cool looking, we’re still trying to figure out what the use of this is? Who is going to be wandering around their office with a camera hooked to a computer? Maybe this is meant more for phones, so you can get quick readings off of the units without having to go access their logs. Since we know how much you guys absolutely love the Arduino, we though you might also be interested in this larger than life portrait we saw floating around.

[via littlebirdceo]