Author: Caleb Kraft

1567 Articles

Track The Sun For Home Lighting.

December 6, 2008 by 14 Comments

sun_track

Have a room in your house that really could benefit from some sunlight? Build a Suntrack to reflect light in as long as possible. The two axis motor set up is built from a couple of  satellite dish positioning motors with the control electronics removed. The whole thing is controlled with a PIC 18f2520.  Once calibrated, it will reflect the sun into your room, updating every twenty seconds. While this may not be the most efficient way of lighting a room, it is a cool way to do it if you absolutely must have sunlight. We can’t help but wonder if there would be a way of using a solar powered system to do this to save energy. Could this possibly be done using BEAM “head” circuit?

[via Hacked Gadgets]

LED Projector

December 6, 2008 by 6 Comments

led_projector

[PuffMag1cDrag0n] shows us how to make a fairly simple projected LED display. The projector is made from a 13×7 LED matrix and a couple fresnel lenses. The layout and construction is similar to the Lumenlab projector setup, only replacing all the lighting and LCD with an LED array. It communicates via serial port and is powered by a pic micro 16f648. We would love to see an RGB version of this. The directions are a bit rushed, but you should be able to get the gist. Just remember that you need some pretty powerful LEDs to throw a big image.

Robot Strippers Not Too Enticing

December 5, 2008 by 22 Comments

robot_strippers

We really aren’t sure what the statement is here.  This is one of the displays at the MuTate London Exhibition. There is tons of stuff to see there, from interactive displays to giant art-piece vehicles. This specific display seems to have garnered the most attention though. we can understand the megaphone headed flailing DJ, but what is with the CCTV camera heads?

[via Gizmodo]

Musical Shirt From Toy Keyboard

December 5, 2008 by 10 Comments

musical_shirt

[mikamika] has put together a great tutorial on how to build this musical shirt. The whole process is covered, from taking apart the toy keyboard to laying out the circuit and creating the fabric switches.  He used the same method as [plusea] for the fabric buttons and conductive thread for most of the connections. It seems as though he has actually taken [plusea]’s wearable shirt project and added some polish. His looks good enough, he might even be able to make it through an airport.

The GO Sequencer

December 4, 2008 by 8 Comments

go_seq

[Guy John] sent in this cool sequencer project. He’s using the game Go as the input. A web camera pics up the location of the pieces on the grid and plots them in his sequencing software. You can see that it is still very much in progress, but it is coming along nicely. He openly admits that it may never be completely practical. There is still so much to be improved to get it even comfortably usable, such as motion detection to remove his hand from the mix when re locating the Go pieces. This project is very similar to the Skittles interface that we posted back in July.  It would be kind of interesting, though probably repetitive, to actually play a game of go and listen to the variations in the music while you play.

Winboni, A Window Cleaning Robot

December 4, 2008 by 27 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kchwH-3tY0]

The Winboni is the first place winner in the International Student Design Competition of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Winboni is a small robot that cleans windows. That alone doesn’t set the robot apart. The fact that it is held on by suction is what distinguishes it. Running off AA batteries, this robot clings to the window as it cleans it with felt pads. It is hard to believe that this isn’t already a commercial product. Actually, we thought we had even seen it before, but we can’t find it now.

[via DVICE]