Author: Caleb Kraft

1567 Articles

Sweat Bot

January 27, 2009 by 13 Comments

sweatbot

The future is here ladies and gentlemen,  robots are truly making our lives better.  The grueling job of sweating into clothing has been taken over by the latest in technology: the sweat bot. With water heated fake skin, and robotic sweat glands, this machine works tirelessly to test clothing. While emulating walking or jogging, it sweats into the clothing. This helps in the design of more breathable and sweat resistant fabrics. Though we know it is just a machine, choosing to put the water hoses through its face was just plain creepy.

[via BotJunkie]

Besmoke – Fluid Dynamics

January 26, 2009 by 9 Comments

[vimeo= 2963541]

Besmoke is a fluid dynamics engine. It is compatible with any multitouch system, as well as the accelerometer in an iPhone. It also accepts audio input. The audio input can turn it into a fancy music visualizer that would even work with live or acoustic music. Different frequencies cause fluid to be injected from different “emitters”. There’s great info on his page, including the papers that he based this off of. We’ve covered [Eric]’s work before with his election party light system.

Autofocus Assist Light

January 26, 2009 by 11 Comments

afassist

[Aki]’s Nikon D2H did not come with an autofocus assist light.  His other cameras have them, and he likes the feature, so he decided to hack one into his D2H. He wired into the AF system, so that his LED gets voltage when the shutter release is pressed half way. The circuit needs refinement though, he found that the light was staying on during shutter release and affecting his light metering. You can see the hack in action after the break.
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Sound Effects Box

January 25, 2009 by 9 Comments

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At first glance, this may look like a retro styled monome, but it is actually quite different. Merging a Project64 key pad and a Voice Shield for Arduino, [Spikenzie] has made a sound effects box. Each button triggers a unique sound that is stored in the Voice Shield. Of coarse, it will be like a game of memory trying to remember what sound is where. You can see a demo video here.

Road Sign Hacking

January 24, 2009 by 159 Comments

We’ve all seen these on the side of the road and wondered how we could change the message. It turns out that it is actually pretty easy. There’s a keypad inside for programming that is often still set with a default password of “DOTS”. Even if the password has been changed, you can reset it right there pretty quickly. We shouldn’t even need to warn you that it is illegal to tamper with these, so unless there really are zombies ahead, you probably shouldn’t mess with it.

[via Neatorama]

Leyden Jar Of DOOM.

January 24, 2009 by 14 Comments

layden

A leyden jar is basically just a simple home made capacitor. We’ve shown you how to make them before. This, however, is how you make a ridiculously large one. [Nickademuss] used a five gallon bucket to make his leyden jar. That’s five whole gallons of lightning. The video, which you can see after the break, shows it light up the entire room when it lets out a fairly formidable spark. This is dangerous folks, be careful.

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Choreographed Christmas Lights

January 23, 2009 by 10 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Cj-morKHPQ]

We’ve covered a couple of different ways of doing choreographed Christmas lights. The most basic being sound activated ones made from speakers, then the parallax controlled ones. This one uses the parallax microcontroller as well, but [prabbit22m] seems to have put some more effort into the construction and enclosure. The lights are all LED this time around and there are 18 outlets that can be individually controlled in a nice, safe enclosure. The choreography was done well too. The capabilities video is pretty impressive, it looks like he has managed to do some fading in and out. You can see it after the break.

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