Mario Doorbell Guaranteed To Drive A-You A-Crazy

February 9, 2014 by Marsh 8 Comments

marioDoorbell

Is your doorbell not exciting enough for your guests? [Joe] wanted to provide a little entertainment for his visitors, so he redesigned his doorbell with a Mario theme.

Whenever someone presses the button—which carries the Mario coin image—the segment display increments and the Mario coin sound plays. To add variety, the life-up sound plays at every 10 coins and the mushroom upgrade sound plays upon reaching 100. [Joe] tried putting the life-up sound at its appropriate 100’s place and the mushroom sound at every 10, but he decided the brevity of life-up was more tolerable in the 10’s slot.

The project was divided into two components. The door button has a PIC16F628A microcontroller with a dual 7-segment LED display, a button, and a homemade circuit board. All this lives in a simple box covered by a Yoshi’s Island-themed decal. The button’s board connects to a separate ringer board—based around a PIC16F87—with a MCP4822 DAC and a 25LC1024 EEPROM. Button presses on the first board prompt a request for a sound clip read on the EEPROM. Keep clicking for a demo video below.

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Upgrading Home Automation To Home Anticipation

February 9, 2014 by Marsh 9 Comments

geofencingHomeAnticipation

[Bithead’s] already built some home automation to control the lighting and temperature in his house while he’s away, but he wanted to take things a step further and have the house automatically anticipate his arrival and adjust the environment accordingly. The project takes advantage of geofencing to create a perimeter around the home that listens for a transceiver in [Bithead’s] car. We featured a similar project with a Raspi a few months ago, which locked the doors upon driving away.

[Bithead’s] implementation uses a pair of Digi Xbee Pro XSC radios with U.FL antennas to provide an impressive 2+ mile range of communication. The home-based Xbee hooks up to a Parallax Xbee USB adapter and subsequently into his computer—its antenna sits in a nearby window on the top floor of his house to maximize range. For his car, [Bithead] originally opted for an Xbee shield and an Arduino Uno, but he’s recently overhauled the build in favor of an Arduino Fio, which reduced the footprint and increased the range. Check out his page for the build log specifics and more pictures.

Exploded Hardware Wall Art

February 6, 2014 by Marsh 15 Comments

The gang at Bolt.io realized that the walls in their office deserved some special attention, and they got it by mounting exploded hardware throughout the space. They sourced the used devices from eBay, then carefully broken them down into their components and mounted each on its own sheet of PETG. The result: exploded views of some of their favorite hardware, including a MacBook Pro, a Roomba, a Dyson Air Multiplier, and more.

Is it a hack? Eh, maybe. This is the first example we’ve seen of a collection of devices on display in this fashion. Regardless, it’s worth a mention considering what happened in the office as a result of the installation. Though the original purpose was simply to decorate the walls, it seems employees have been staring at them regularly, learning more about the designs, the plastics, and the component choices. Think of it as still life—depicting that moment you cracked open a device to inspect its guts—frozen in permanence and on display for both inspiration and convenience.

[via reddit | Thanks Buddy]

RasPi “Inception” CD-ROM Case Mod

February 1, 2014 by Marsh 9 Comments

raspiInception

At first glance, [John’s] CD-ROM RasPi case may not seem all that unique, but we like both the implementation as well as the end-result functionality it provides. His goal was to use the Pi as a torrent downloader, and to store the downloaded files on a shared network drive. The Pi drive would slide into a bay in the server’s case—hence the Inception reference: a computer in a computer—allowing downloads while putting another step between the server and the outside world keeping, as well as guaranteeing that the network share would be available, because the server and the Pi would use the same power source.

[John] gutted the CD-ROM’s internals to leave only the PCB, which he stripped of most everything save for the power connector in the back. He then used the base of his old RasPi case as a standoff, mounting it to the top of the CD-ROM’s PCB. He soldered the power lines to the ROM’s power connector and temporarily hooked up a 5V adapter until he gets the server running. The final step was to carve out the back of the case for access to the Ethernet and USB ports, which [John] accomplished with a dremel, a hacksaw and a file. The front of the case still looks like a stock CD-ROM drive, and [John] has plans for future mods: re-purposing the LED to show network activity and modifying the buttons to serve as a reset, pause, or start for torrent downloads.

Immersion: Video Game Biofeedback

January 31, 2014 by Marsh 16 Comments

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We’re not sure how scientific the following hack is, but it’s certainly interesting. Designer [Samuel Matson], interested in the correlation between gaming and stress, has pieced together a device that provides biofeedback during gameplay. He referenced this /r/gaming thread—which measured a player’s heart rate during a Halo session—as well as conducted his own tests that monitored the heart rate of gamers. After several iterations, [Samuel] had the above-pictured headset, which features the familiar and hackable pulse sensor placed by the earpiece.

The headset uses a TinyDuino and a Bluetooth TinyShield to communicate to the gamer’s computer in real time. He didn’t stop with simply monitoring heart rates, however; he integrated the signal into the game design. [Samuel] used indie-favorite game engine Unity3d to create a third-person shooter that reacts to the pulse sensor by raising the difficulty level when the player’s heart rate increases. It seems that his goal is to reduce or control stress among players, but we suspect inverting the model may be more effective: have the game cut you some slack when you’re stressed and present a challenge when you’re mellow.

[Thanks Ken]

Pan Flute Hero

January 30, 2014 by Marsh 21 Comments

panflutehero

The latest creation in the never-ending collection of “____ Hero” instruments is this Raspi-infused pan flute, built by [Sven Andersson] and his team at the 2013 WOW Hackathon. The flute itself consists of varying lengths of bamboo from a local flower shop, cut short enough to be hand-held while still hiding the Pi from the front side. In the spirit of other ‘Hero’ instruments, the pan flute has no real musical functionality. Each pipe houses what appears to be an electret microphone breakout board, which they kept in place by sealing off the end of the pipe with glue.

The sensors connect to the GPIO connector on the Raspi, which communicates to a local TCP/IP server the team ran as a controller hub. The game is also their original creation, written entirely in LUA. They turned to Spotify to find suitable material for the player to experience, creating playlists with actual pan flute songs and using the libspotify SDK to access the music. You can see the end result of the project in a short demo video below.

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The FilaWinder

January 30, 2014 by Marsh 6 Comments

filawinder

The latest addition to the line of 3D printer accessories is the FilaWinder, a tool for winding your filament neatly onto a spool. If you’ve abandoned buying your filament by the reel in favor of making your own from cheaper pellets—such as the Lyman Extruder, the Filabot Wee, or other alternatives, including the winder’s companion product, the FilaStruder—then you’ve likely had to roll everything up by hand, perhaps after it flopped around on the floor first.

The FilaWinder spools for you while the filament extrudes, using a sensor to adjust the winding the speed to match extrusion rates as well as running it through some PTFE tube to gently coil it as it moves along. Perhaps most important, the FilaWinder provides a guide arm to direct the filament back and forth across the reel as it spools up, to keep it evenly distributed. Swing by their Thingaverse page for a list of printable pieces and their assembly guide can be found here, as well as on YouTube. You can see an overview video of the FilaWinder winding away after the break.

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