“Ask An Engineer” Live Streams At Adafruit

January 31, 2011 by Caleb Kraft 6 Comments

I [Caleb], finally had a chance to catch one of the live chat sessions over at Adafruit.com called “Ask an engineer“. I was pleasantly surprised. Though the show is only an hour long, the amount of information covered was quite amazing. They started out, announcing a new, this really cool looking touch screen system, product and going over the tech specs. This very quickly turned into a question and answer session about how to utilize and modify the device. [Limor], aka [ladyada] was extremely knowledgeable and [rossum], the designer who made it even showed up in the chat to fill in the rare gap. After that, there was a general question and answer period where people were firing off questions so fast I couldn’t watch them all and still follow her answers. It was a lot of fun and quite frankly felt way too short.

Be sure to check it out on Saturday night at 10:00 P.M. ET

Evalbot Nunchuck Control

January 31, 2011 by Caleb Kraft 16 Comments

[Martin] got his evalbot recently and wanted to try controlling it with his Wii nunchuck. After some trial and error, he finally got it working. He’s shown that controlling the bot with the nunchuck was actually pretty simple, but there are some other tips that could be pretty helpful in the process. One was the fact that the point where he’s taking power for the nunchuck could easily be shorted on the motor. He wrapped his in tape, but we could see this little bug pestering us for a while before we figured out what it was. You can download his code and see his build process on his site. Be sure to catch the video of it working in both accelerometer and joystick mode after the break.

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Insane Covert IR Illumination

January 31, 2011 by Caleb Kraft 37 Comments

[Onironaut] over at lucidscience sent us a link to his latest project, some IR illumination panels. At first, we were mildly enticed by his usual high standard of photography and description. It was just an array of LEDs though. Still, we kept hitting the “next page” button because he goes into such great detail. Then we saw version two. Instead of simply being an array of IR LEDs mounted outside for his security camera, he has mounted 1536 IR LEDs inside an old flat panel monitor. That’s a fake monitor producing 180 watts of IR light, and we think that’s even at half power! He replaced the screen of the display with one way mirror, so you would have no idea that it isn’t just a normal screen sitting on his desk. Great job as usual [Onironaut].

SNES Arcade Controller

January 30, 2011 by Caleb Kraft 22 Comments

[Daniel] is making a mini arcade cabinet with an SNES housed inside. He wanted to build an arcade controller for it and chose to construct something from scratch instead of destroying an original piece of hardware. We can almost feel you guys sighing with relief at that one. He sent us some nice photos of his build and pointed out that he’s using one of the Evilmadscientist AVR boards housing an ATtiny2313. The arcade buttons are readily available at sparkfun. The source code for this project is available after the break.

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Snail Mail Notification System

January 30, 2011 by Caleb Kraft 29 Comments

[Mime] lives on one of the upper levels of an apartment complex. The mailboxes, being located at the ground floor can be somewhat inconvenient to check regularly. [Mime] decided to rig up a device to let him know when his mailbox had been accessed. He started with a wireless doorbell, thinking he could use the door side button inside his mailbox as a trigger with only some slight modification. On the receiver side, he wanted an LED to flash, letting him know that it was time to check his mail. One simple circuit and a self blinking LED later and the whole setup was finished. Great job [Mime]

Jeri Getting Her Own Show?

January 30, 2011 by Caleb Kraft 35 Comments

[Jeri Ellsworth] has been very excited about this new opportunity. She sent us a “pilot video“, so we’re assuming that there will be more to come. In the pilot, she explains how to build a musical art installation that will play music when a viewer is in position. She covers several different ways to detect the presence of the person, ultimately landing on using a PIR sensor for detection. We can’t wait to see where this show goes, but we hope she continues to do her own hacking videos as well.

Fabulous Magic 8 Ball Prank

January 28, 2011 by Caleb Kraft 37 Comments

Hackaday forum user [arfink] has shown us a brilliant practical joke he built. This is a magic 8 ball that will blind you with a flash when you flip it over. Have you ever been in a room with one of these and not flipped it over? Neither have we. Using a basic flash circuit ripped from a disposable camera in conjunction with a mercury switch, this project took him about 2 hours to make. Admittedly, most of that time was just trying to split the 8 ball in half without completely destroying it. The circuit is pretty simple. Just figure out what 2 wires need to be crossed to trigger the flash and install your tilt switch there. He added a power cut off so you could disable it as well.

UPDATE: video added after the break! Continue reading “Fabulous Magic 8 Ball Prank” →