Simple, Elegant, Lemon Battery

[Madaeon] pointed us toward this entry for the Instructables Epilog challenge. While this may not be extremely complex, or have as many wires as our typical post, it is a fantastic example of thinking outside the box. How many lemon batteries have we seen? A lot. This one stands out as being more elegantly displayed and functional at the same time. In its final form, you sprinkle lemon juice on it’s petals and it lights up. If you ever find yourself in the position of teaching someone about electronics, remember this project. Sometimes aesthetics can make a dull simple project take on a life of its own.

S-video From An Atari 2600

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[Ben Heck] posted this writeup about getting S-Video/composite out of an Atari 2600. This is actually the hack of [Longhorn Engineer], who showed it to [Ben] at a recent event. If any of you have tried to play these classics on a modern TV you may have found it to be quite difficult. If you manage to get it physically connected, through adapters and such, you may still have video issues. This alleviates that issue completely. After you solder this in, your Atari has native composite/S-video. As you can see in the video after the break, it seems to work pretty well.

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Wiimote Controlled Hexapods

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsBj7koZ9lk]

The Phoenix is a very impressive hexapod robot platform. It has 18 servos which gives each leg 3 degrees of freedom and a BasicAtom Pro 28 for the brains. Interestingly, the design started as a personal project of a forum member on the Lynxmotion forums. It turned out so well, it has become an actual product. We’ve seen videos of these before and they always have some pretty fluid and organic seeming motion. They seem almost alive in this configuration. The only thing that might make them scarier would be to add Lou Vega’s decapitated head, well maybe that plus some really nice face tracking. In the video above, you can see where someone paired one up with a Wiimote for a pretty intuitive control scheme. Yeah, we realize the video is nearly a year old, how did we miss this one? You can see a video of it walking around after the break, and another controlled by a ps2 controller.

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New Driver From RepRap, Singing

stepper

RepRap has released a new driver board for their stepper motors. They’ve honed the design to be easier to assemble and cheaper. We’re sure all of that is wonderful, but what really got our attention was the video. In the video, which you can see after the break, they run a test file through it to make it “sing” happy birthday. Is this something that everybody does and we’re just now catching on? Why all the musical stepper motors today?

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Arduino VGA Glitching

glitch

For some people, mistakes or glitches has become an art form. We’ve seen it in circuit bending for a while, but the newest version is in video glitching. [Sebastian] has gone so far as to intentionally set up an Arduino to send a glitched signal to a monitor. His description sounds pretty easy. We’re just assuming this is in motion in some way, a video of it in action would be nice.

Power Glove 20th Anniversary Edition

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Using an original Power Glove, a bluetooth module, an Arduino, and an accelerometer, [Biphenyl] brought the system up to date. As you can see in the video after the break, the new version is wireless and much more useful in the games. Skip to 11 minutes in if you just want to see it in action. There’s a full writeup on Instructables if you want to build your own.  We love the power glove and we can’t wait to see a more developed game for it. This beats the Power Glove Wiimote, hands down.

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Lego Head Tracking

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[Epoch] Sent in this simple head tracking project using Lego pieces. He’s made a custom mount to hold 3 Lego light sensors on a baseball cap. Then, after modifying his webcam for IR with some floppy disk scraps, he loads up the free-track software and can control his games. For convenience, he has programmed the Lego Nxt to only turn on the lights while he’s holding a contact sensor. You can see it in action after the break. This appears to be very similar to [Johnny Lee’s] head tracking. Judging by the video, it’s not as smooth though.

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