Rain Activated Light Show In An Umbrella

May 20, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 6 Comments

In a decision we completely agree with, these industrious young women decided that playing in the rain would only be more fun if it included an interactive light show. They wanted the rain itself to cause LEDs in their umbrella to light up. To achieve this, they put piezo sensors on each of the 8 panels of the umbrella. When that panel gets hit, its LEDs light up. You can see in the video after the break that it was quite effective.

Their next step should be to somehow increase the resolution to be similar to this one, while maintaining interactivity with the rain. How would you sense rain drops with more definition though?

[via Adafruit]

DeLorean Hovercraft

May 20, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 11 Comments

[Matthew Riese] got frustrated waiting for the future to arrive so he could have his flying car. He decided to take things into his own hands and construct the closest thing he could. This turned out to be a hovercraft. Not only that, but he thought that the most fitting shape for this thing would be a DeLorean. We can’t say that we disagree with him. Unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot of information on his build. There is this cool video on his kickstarter page (don’t worry, he got funded back in 2010). To make up for the fact that the build information is sparse, we’ve found you some plans to make your own hovercraft. Just add whatever shape body you want, though we have some suggestions.

[via Makezine]

Geeks Living Off The Grid Are Hard On Batteries

May 19, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 37 Comments

Many of you will remember [Mikey Sklar] from the multitude of times he’s been on hackaday. What you may not have noticed is that he is an ubergeek, living off the grid.

He has Solar PV battery bank, three electric vehicles, a shipping container loaded with battery powered tools and a small army of iRobot Roomba’s for cleaning. Getting the maximum lifetime out of a battery by removing sulfation is essential to keep expenses down.

Keeping expenses down is nearly a full time job when trying to live the homestead lifestyle. Our current culture makes it extremely difficult to survive completely on self made/grown things and bartering. They seem to be doing pretty well though. One way he can reduce his costs while still getting to enjoy some modern gadgets is to get longer life out of his batteries. He does this by using a capacitive battery charger and desolfator that he designed and affectionately calls “Da Pimp”. He also brings in a little bit of income by selling kits!

A capacitive charger behaves like a constant current power supply dynamically adjusting the voltage to get over the batteries internal resistance. Plus there is a pulse from the AC/DC conversion. This allows for old batteries to last longer and for dumpster dived to be used as replacements. Capacitive chargers are small, silent and super efficent (up to 60% more so than cheap transformer based chargers).

Of course, [Mikey] is a supporter of sharing information so you can also go to his site and download the schematics,bill of materials, gerber files, and files for the housing, to build one yourself.

Building A Color Sensor Using Luminosity

May 19, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 13 Comments

[Richard Osgood] is back again with an interesting project. This time he has constructed a color sensor. His initial design was to use three LEDs and a photoresistor. He would shine a red, then green, then blue LED on a surface and record the reflected light with the photoresistor allowing him to determine how much reflected light there was of each color. Unfortunately, he found it to be completely unreliable. An attempt at using a light frequency sensor didn’t work either. What did finally work, was a luminosity sensor shown above.

Finally, his prototype worked. Unfortunately only the red LED gives readings that he considers to be adequate with the blue and green being “not all quite right”. With this type of circuit, he could build a clone of the magic chameleon lamp.

Reminder: SpaceX Launch Tomorrow. Watch It Live!

May 18, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 74 Comments

There isn’t a hacker out there that isn’t interested at least a little bit in the prospect of building a mission specific rocket to explode someone off the face of the planet… without killing them. We got a tiny taste of what is coming when they let us watch their engine test a few weeks ago. Tomorrow, May 19th, they are going to broadcast a launch live! You can watch it on their site beginning at 1:15 AM pacific. For some additional insight, you can also read the tweets of [Elon Musk], the founder of spaceX during the event.

Take a few minutes and enjoy the video below that discusses the program and some of the engineering obstacles they’ve had to overcome.

[via BoingBoing]

Continue reading “Reminder: SpaceX Launch Tomorrow. Watch It Live!” →

Mixing Colors On The Reprap

May 18, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 14 Comments

3d printing has come huge strides in ability to construct detailed objects. Unfortunately, color is still a considerable limitation. Here, some people at the Reprap blog are having fun coming up with an extruder head that actually mixes two colors as it deposits them. Don’t confuse this with the dual head that Makerbot is touting that allows you to switch colors on the fly, this is a single head that actually has a cavity where the material is melted, then stirred to create a combination of the two. It is an interesting method of overcoming a limited supply of colors.

Having this extra stirring chamber means that there would be a small amount of material wasted any time that you wanted to make a change to the color, as it would have to be purged. There are some interesting thoughts in their comments on how to use this extra material most efficiently.

3d Printed Nes Portable Looks Fantastic And Contains No Hot Glue

May 17, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 11 Comments

[Parker] emailed us today to show off his latest NES portable build. This time he’s using the standard “top loader” NES instead of the typically used NES on a chip. This is pretty cool since the NES on a chip has compatibility issues with some games. For the screen, he uses a common PSone screen with a slight power modification. From the factory, the screen takes 7.4 V and converts it down to 5V to use. He removed this and ran it directly from his own 5V power source. It may not seem like that big of a deal, but with portables, every bit counts. He also ditched the sound amplifier from the PSone screen in favor of something a little more efficient. He seems to have done a pretty good job because he says it gets roughly 10 hours at full volume right now.

Another cool aspect of this deign is that the cartridge serves as a sort of stand for the unit, although the button placement looks like it might be a tiny bit awkward when used this way.