Push Potentiometer From Spares

August 28, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 8 Comments

In an effort to simplify his interface, [danwagoner] cobbled together this push potentiometer. It utilizes a potentiometer mounted directly above a push button with a spring mounted around it. This way the user has only one item to deal with. They can twist the knob and press down on it to push the button. We love seeing people come up with ways of creating their own items instead of buying something. This was fairly inventive and reminds us of the LED buttons we saw back in January. Great job [danwagoner].

Phasma Insectoid

August 27, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 8 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iYZVz8l0Nk]

When we saw the video of the Phasma insectoid robot above, we immediately thought of the iSprawl. After checking out their site, it turns out that the two are connected in some way, we’re not sure how, maybe just inspiration. The Phasma gives us a little more insight into the construction of the bot. The photos are highly detailed so you can see how the drive works, using the sliding cables to extend the “feet”. It seems quite agile in the video. The drive system, working off of a single cam seems like it would be easy to convert to steam. We would love to see that.

[via the pink tentacle]

Bliplace LED Toy

August 27, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 28 Comments

[blip.tv ?posts_id=2542286&dest=-1]

These wearable LED toys called Bliplace are freshly made and headed to Burning Man. They’re pretty much just a sound reactive toy, but [Tanjent] decided to go pretty in depth in the design. They are 1″ wide octagons with 3 super bright LEDs and a microphone. The microphone is sampled at 4400 hz by the ATTiny25v and the signal is split into high and low frequency streams. The center LED is low frequency, the sides are the high. They can run a full week on a battery. He’ll be handing out 350 of them at Burning Man, then releasing the source code, boards, and kits after that.

Experimental Search Engine Display

August 26, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 18 Comments

goodTimes.searchEngine is an experimental set up to display search engine results. Be sure you’re using Firefox or IE, because it isn’t working with chrome right now. [Gordon] pointed us to it and asked for our feedback. We had a pretty quick list of improvements we would like to see, such as the category changes not popping up in new windows, or the new windows appearing on top for that matter. Or most importantly, a way to transition from the fancy preview window to a new tab or window. We are curious to hear your thoughts on this. What would make it better? Is it even needed? Is he building a tool to fix a problem that isn’t there? With Bing showing some nice new features over google, would something like this be of more use?

Open-Frame Digital Clock

August 26, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 13 Comments

Here’s an interesting project from several years ago. The clock design itself isn’t too noteworthy, but the construction is definitely inspired. You’ll notice that there is no breadboard or PCB, the frame actually is the circuit. The tubes he’s using are Numitron tubes, which aren’t as high voltage as Nixies or even VFDs. This means that there is only 12V maximum going through the exposed rails. He discusses some possible future upgrades such as LED or Nixie or VFD, but since this project is a few years old, who knows if he is still working with it.

[thanks Agent420]

Palm Pre GPS Tweets

August 25, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 15 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnlM8UJUtOQ]

[Mike] sent in this project he’s been working on. He has posted instructions on how to get your Palm Pre to tweet its GPS coordinates at regular intervals. It does require that you have Linux installed on your Pre, but that’s not that big of an issue as he has a tutorial for that too. Getting the tweet to happen involves setting up a custom PHP file that sends the tweet, then a cron job to get it to run on a schedule. He mentions this could be useful for finding a lost phone as well as keeping track of loved ones. We would like to see him add a script to do similar with a picture. Maybe take a picture and upload it every time a call is placed?

Autogiro POV Nostalgia

August 24, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 11 Comments

blade_screen (Custom)

This bit of nostalgia really caught our attention. A german hacker or “inventor” as we were called back then, came up with this interesting concept. He would project an image on to the moving blades of an Autogiro, relying on the POV effect to make it appear complete. While this is not the same system of utilizing POV that we currently use, it relies on the same principles. It looks like he’s hanging the projector or “magic lantern” from below the Autogiro, using the length of the rope to hang it as a focusing system. Were this to have actually gone into production, it probably would have really freaked people out. If only he had had access to something along the lines of the ceiling fan POV system.

[thanks itay]

[update: Why didn’t we look around for this earlier. It was brought up in the comments, there is in fact a POV system for R/C helis. http://www.nightgraphix.de (translated)]