Hacking The MINI Cooper

November 10, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 10 Comments

cooper_power

[war6763] sent us this hack to power an amplifier in a MINI Cooper. Apparently, aside from being unconventionally handsome, they’re also unconventionally wired. Amplifiers are generally wired to the ignition or stereo and turned on when the car is turned on. Due to some strange wiring, this just isn’t possible in the MINI Cooper. Some people use the cigarette lighter to power on their amplifier, but [war6763] wanted something that left his cigarette lighter free for other things. He built a circuit that monitors the cars built in USB input line and turns his amp on and off accordingly. The entire unit cost around $10.00. You can see the video demonstration after the break.

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WaldFlöte: Midi Controlled Pipe Organ

November 10, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 7 Comments

Members of Dorkbot Edinburgh have done what most of us would do if we had a 19th century pipe organ. They hacked it to be midi controlled. The organ is located above a cafe owned by the university of Edinburgh. Students have been repairing and modifying it to get it back in working order.

The electronics are composed of an Xilinx Spartan-3E Starter Kit as the brains and a Microblaze processor converting midi events for the solenoids. The cool thing is that none of this required any permanent modification to the organ itself. It can all be removed to put the organ back in normal playing condition. Check out the video after the break for some classical Van Halen.

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CatGenie Hacking

November 7, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 37 Comments

[ScottSEA] has six cats. As you can imagine, with six cats, a simple litter box just doesn’t cut it. [ScottSEA] uses the CatGenie. While a self cleaning cat toilet is a technical marvel, it has one major drawback. Much like an ink jet printer, it has disposable cartridges. Those cartridges, just ike some print cartridges, have a built in counter that disables them after so many uses. After adding up the totals for six cats worth of cartridge use, [ScottSEA] started hacking. He has posted directions on how to manually refill them, as well as reset the internal counter using an Arduino.

We suggest that he find a way to harness all that cat power for his home electronics. How many watts could you produce per cat?

Acidmods Custom FPS Controller

November 7, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 12 Comments

fpsutil3

Yet another custom X Box controller has come out of the acidmods foundry. This one, specialized for FPS games opts for two analog sticks up front, and complete removal of the D pad and buttons. They break down the process quite nicely with very detailed pictures of how to modify the case and move the analog stick. Check out the video of it in action after the break.

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Arduino RC Airplane

November 7, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 13 Comments

arduino_airplane

[Olivier] told us about this fantastic project where he built his own RC airplane. The airplane itself is nothing special, it is the controls that are worth paying attention to. He used an Arduino Diecemilla , some XBee transceivers, and a SparkFun Wee. The main site is a general overview, but there are links to more detailed breakdowns of how to build some of the parts. There are several videos of him flying it as well.

Gyro Controlled Game

November 6, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 4 Comments

gyro_game

[Eric] sent in this cool project that he did as part of his graduation project. He built a game that uses a gyroscope as an input device. For the gyroscope, he’s using a Powerball with a sensor inserted into it. This data is gathered by an Arduino in a pretty enclosure. The whole unit connects to a PC via USB and is supposedly plug and play. There’s a video of the setup in action on the site, just try not to laugh too hard watching them.

Arduino Wireless Rotating POV

November 5, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 4 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QMV4mRVpo4]

got an old cdrom and an Arduino laying around? Why not make it into a spinning POV display. It was built using parts from a floppy drive and a cdrom, as well as an Arduino and a small wireless transceiver. Using an IR sensor to detect rotations, the Arduino sends data to the LEDs. The wireless is used when sending new messages to the device. The link is in Spanish, so here’s the Google Translation.

[via Hacked Gadgets]