The Story Of Mr. Stabby

May 26, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 24 Comments

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

Mr. Stabby was once a broken down bum, sitting on the curb, waiting for an eternity in the city dump. Luckily, someone found him and brought him to the NYC Resistor hacker group. They promptly performed some modifications and brought him back to life.

He’s now a happy go lucky stab-bot with a twinkle in his eye and a skip in his step. His repitoir includes gouging, slashing, and of course stabbing. He can be controlled via a cell phone and has a nifty voice interface.

The video above is from when Mr. Stabby was runner up at the tech crunch hackday.

Poor MABEL

May 25, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 23 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/IlWIWf4daNs]

At first, watching this video of MABEL, a bipedal robot for studying dynamic gaits, we didn’t know if we should be scared or feel sad. By the end, we know that sadness prevailed. Poor MABEL, forced into a grueling routine, is not even allowed to rest when her leg breaks.

To be serious though, MABEL is quite impressive. Instead of using a direct drive on the legs, motors are attached to springs that act like tendons. This helps compensate for variances in the walking surface, hopefully allowing for smoother transitions between gaits as well. As you can see, MABEL handles the height differences quite well, albeit a bit slowly. It is worth noting that there are no visual sensors on MABEL and everything is done through feedback from her gait.

Sun Tracking Solar Panel

May 24, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 17 Comments

As we all know, a solar panel must be exposed to the most amount of sunlight possible to reach full efficiency. A solid mount limits the amount of time that the panel is fully exposed to direct sunlight. The solution is to build a pivoting mount that automates the process of aiming at the sun.

[bwitmer] takes us through the process of building one out of some wood and old bicycle rims. He bought a pre made tracking unit to control his actuator, but we think many of you here could rig something up on your own.

[via HacknMod]

Hack A Day Store Now Open

May 22, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 53 Comments

Since the beginning of the universe we’ve been getting requests for stickers, shirts, coffee mugs, etc. Well, several of the writers have the ability to produce this stuff in their homes. The boss liked that and gave us his blessing to start selling Hack a Day stuff.

In the interest of keeping the cost as low as possible, right now the store is located inside of my personal online store. The only products we have right now are stickers, since I make them myself. Though if enough of you pester him, maybe [Devlin] will make up a batch of those Hack a Day badges.

Please be patient with the store. It is fairly untested and tossing this many people at it at once is somewhat frightening. If you have any problems at all, please contact me (caleb@) and I’ll take care of it. You can get to the store by clicking the new button on the right of the screen, labelled “store”. You can see a few more pictures after the break.

Note: Thos of you who are outside of the US, please just contact me directly. I have to figure out your shipping outside the system. Don’t go fill out an order.

Continue reading “Hack A Day Store Now Open” →

Power Drill Solder Spooler

May 21, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 21 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cF4cw41SMvY]

[Scott] over at curiousinventor.com has posted an instructable detailing how to use an Arduino and a power drill to spool solder. The Arduino senses the speed that the drill is going via an opto interrupter and a laser and adjusts with a servo hooked to the trigger. While we don’t think many people will be dying to spool some solder, this system might be useful for all kinds of things, like winding yarn or making coils.

32 LED POV Globe

May 19, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 26 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bt1UEGD3BDk]

Here’s a slick version of a POV globe(google translated). Created by [Riko], this globe has 32 LEDs and is powered by a rotating coil. The layout looks fairly solid in operation, with the POV effect showing up very nicely on camera. You can get the schematics and source code from the project page.

We found this project, just like the previous fantastic LED globe on HackedGadgets.com. Apparently someone linked to this project in the comments. That is fantastic, that is what the comments should be for. Please help keep our comments polite and helpful as well, even if you are just linking to a project that you think is better.

Super Quick And Cheap Trackball

May 18, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 18 Comments

[Elgatoandaluz] has posted this guide on how to tear apart a standard optical mouse and build a custom trackball. He’s using a ping pong ball , mounted above the laser as the trackball itself, which seems like it would be a little lite, but functional. The case is scrap cardboard. We really like that you could toss this together relatively quickly and have a custom layout. He recommends using Sakasa Mouse for inverting the axes and X-control for mapping the buttons(direct download).