Complete The Hack A Day Survey, Win A Shirt

July 21, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 77 Comments

Take our reader survey. Do it. Do it right now. Do you think we should run more articles on the dietary needs of Llamas? Here is your chance to let us know. We got a lot of great feedback from [Jason]’s post, and now we’re ready for more. We’ve put together 10 quick questions that will help us get a feeling for what you want. We will be choosing 5 participants at random to give free t-shirts (the basic logo one).

Update: While we wait for our survey slave to get the changes made, please just put something in the fields that are mandatory(questions 7-9). Even if you put “no opinion”, we’ll get good info from the rest of the survey.

Wifi Hotspot Powered By Wind Turbine And Solar Panel

July 20, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 19 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-MZmQqxrYM]

Students at the Rochester Institute of technology have put together this WiFi hotspot that is powered by a wind turbine and a solar panel. It gets its signal through a parabolic antenna pointed at a near by building and repeats it for use in the vicinity. They are using a 30W solar panel, along with a 1/4 horse power 90V DC motor to charge two 6V batteries in series. On a windy day, the turbine has yielded 120W. Something interesting to note is a comment they made about blades. Though the ultimately decided to mimic a commercial design for wind turbines, they found the most efficient to be a single wood prop. Unfortunately, that prop was destroyed.

[via HackedGadgets]

Making Glow Sticks At Home

July 18, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 27 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tItOOpyJP5k]

Even if you have no interest in making these yourself, you might enjoy this educational instructable about making your own glow sticks. Comprised of a very short list of chemicals, all available online, the process is fairly simple. If you’re feeling like you want to take on a little more complicated chemistry project, you can also make the TCPO component your self, possibly saving some money as the individual components are cheaper than the final product. As they note, it is just cheaper and easier to buy a glow stick, unless you are making mass quantities.

RFID Cat Feeder Helps With The Diet

July 17, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 29 Comments

[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/10896151]

When faced with having 2 cats with different dietary needs, [Landmanr] had to decide between manually stopping the cat on a diet from eating normal food, or building a dietary robot overlord. [Landmanr] chose the robot route. Using an old cd rom for the opening/closing mechanism, and RFID to distinguish between felines, [Landmanr] no longer has to stand guard while each cat eats. We particularly like the design of the antenna, so that the cat has to stick its head through it to activate the food opening. You don’t see that version in the video, but it is in the instructable.

General Purpose Robot Remote

July 16, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 10 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuwb3fn51r4]

[theGrue] has posted his Robot remote control project for us to gawk at. This box o’ buttons is a parallax propeller brain with some Xbee units for communication. Though it was designed to work with TOBI, his tool carrying robot, he made it so that he could control a multitude of robots with it by flipping some switches on the front of the remote.

[via Hacked Gadgets]

Foam Board Servo Driven Arm

July 15, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 10 Comments

[Lucky Larry] posted some pictures to the Hack a Day flickr pool that caught our eye. He made a quick and cheap servo driven arm. Constructed from foam board and some hobby servos, he’s using an Arduino for the brains. You can download the pattern for the arm pieces as well as the code on his site.

He ultimately finds that he has positioning issues that he blames on the cheap servos. You can see in the video on his site that the circles it is drawing are drifting one direction.

Fankart And The HolyF***k!ted Fan

July 14, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 44 Comments

Inspired by a ducted fan project to simulate lunar landers he had seen recently, [Charles Guan] decided to do the next logical thing and make a ducted fan driven shopping cart. The first iteration had a bare prop mounted to the front of the cart. Steering was done by mounting a servo to the front wheels. This ridiculously dangerous shopping cart can be seen in the videos buzzing around the halls and parking lots of MIT. The second iteration that has the ducted fan drive seems not only slightly safer, but somewhat quicker as well. He does mention that the prop shape isn’t really optimal for a ducted design, so expect future revisions to be everything you would expect from a fan powered shopping cart.

He has built a more practical mobile shopping cart, if there is such a thing, called Lolriokart. This thing probably deserves its own post as well as it is a fully drive-able shopping cart. You can see a video of it in action after the break.

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