Author: Caleb Kraft

1567 Articles

Ipod GPS

April 27, 2009 by 6 Comments

ipod_gps

[Benjamin] was working for a GPS company called Nemerix about two years ago and decided to hack together this iPod accessory GPS unit.  He is using an Atmel ATmega324 and a Nemerix GPS unit, though he says the GPS unit shouldn’t matter. He is taking advantage of the AiR mode on the iPod which allows a 4 color image to be sent to the screen. There was little information on how to utilize this, but BMW and Alpine had made some car audio that featured this. [Benjamin] picked up an Alpine with this function and sniffed the data stream to get what he needed. He says there is good documentation out there now though.

He says that the source code is available if you ask.

Exercising To Space Invaders

April 26, 2009 by 16 Comments

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[Matt] sent in this cool final project he did for his Computer Engineering course. They built a space invaders clone, where the player has to physically move back and forth to move the ship, and jump to fire. The game is projected on the wall, with a camera mounted below it, facing the player. The player, wearing an orange vest, is tracked for the movement and the firing. They also included a blue tooth heart rate sensor with the ultimate goal of using this data to vary the game difficult, but didn’t end up getting the code in. You can see a video of them testing it out at the end of his post.

Analog Audio Recorded On A Floppy

April 24, 2009 by 33 Comments

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[Jeri ellsworth] of fatmanandcircuitgirl.com has made an audio recorder out of a floppy disk and an old tape recorder. She’s able to record 15 seconds of audio directly to floppy disk. In the video after the break, she explains how it works, and why you hear the creepy reverb effect. The next step is to run this as a pedal effect for stage music, and she even mentions doing a larger hard drive version with the ability to seek tracks.

Continue reading “Analog Audio Recorded On A Floppy” →

Flying Penguins Are Awesome

April 24, 2009 by 20 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5JHMpLIqO4]

Festo, people who brought us the Manta Ray blimp are back with giant flying penguins. Actually, there’s lots of cool stuff in this video. The flying penguins are nice, but the swimming versions are amazingly believable. They need to sell these as pool toys. There’s also an interactive wall sculpture and a dangling grabby hand that apparently solves the age old riddle; “How many weird dangly grabby things does it take to randomly place several light bulbs in different sockets?”. The answer is, one.  Just like last time, they’re sharing some details in PDF form for both the air penguins and the aqua penguins.

Quick Cheap Ring Flash

April 24, 2009 by 13 Comments

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Here’s a great example of a cheap mod that gets professional results. This ring flash cost roughly $14 all together, and they got to eat some fruit salad in the process.  The parts list is pretty easy and can almost be figured out just by looking at the picture. A plastic bowl, an aluminum can, some foil, and a lens adapter. This is very nice and much easier than our last ring light post.