Timed Shot-glass Won’t Let You Stop Drinking

March 1, 2011 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

[Drewbagd] was inspired by the 555 timer contest and decided to make this his very first electronics project. It’s an accessory for a drinking game called the Power Hour. The game (if you could call it that) consists of contestants drinking one shot of beer every minute for one hour. [Drewbagd] points out that timing the shots can be an issue and so he decided to augment each shot glass with its own timer.

He added a base that consists of a ring of LEDs surrounding a 555 timer and the cap and resistors. This causes the timer to oscillate from illuminated for a few seconds (drink) to dark for one minute (refill). He calls it the Powered Power Hour. The video after the break shows off the functionality, and it hints at a bright future for [Drewbagd] as an infomercial Emcee.

He’s got a supporting post that detail the electronics and outline some of the prototyping issues. We were happy to hear that when he got stuck he found help over on Hackaday’s forums. Thank you to all who participate in the community by sharing their knowledge.

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Automated Window Curtain Hits The Road

March 1, 2011 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

[Niklas Roy] upgraded his privacy curtain and is taking it on the road. Regular readers will remember the first version that resided in his shop window and used video processing in conjunction with a motor to keep the small bit of curtain in front of any passersby. We’ve embedded the original demo video after the break and it’s not to be missed.

But now he’s decided to make some upgrades to the system because it’s going to be shown as an art display. He looked around for a motor upgrade but found that the best motor at the most reasonable price could be pulled from a Makita power drill. The track itself is modular, making the installation scalable up to ten meters in total length. He even built a clean-looking laptop dock that handles the video processing end of things. But there’s something here for you as well. He’s released all of his source code, schematics, board design, and even the SketchUp files for the motor mounts and other parts. Dig out that old power drill and build one of your own.

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Let There Be Cake – And Video Games In One Package

March 1, 2011 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

Encourage your kids to play with their food by making a cake that looks like a toy. The Nintendo DS lookalike houses some electronics to spruce up the presentation. The upper panel is cardboard covered in frosting to tie it in with the edible lower sections. That cardboard panel hides a couple of LEDs that blink thanks to a blinking Christmas light bulb in series with the diodes. There is also an LCD screen backlight in the form of to CCFL bulbs. The screen is just a still image but that’s okay, you can’t expect an actual video screen to be built into this. Take a look at the clip after the break to see the internals.

We’ve looked in on a few other cake hacks in the past. If you missed them before now’s your chance to revisit the gantry-based frosting dispenser and the turn-table frosting injector with silver-orb detailing. These are some sweet hacks!

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Walking Motion Analysis Using Wii Remotes

March 1, 2011 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

WiiGait is not a political scandal, it’s a project that records motion data while walking. [Bilal Chishti] and [Zassa Kavuma] are strapping a Wii remote onto each leg and recording the sensor data while making video of the walker at the same time. The two are using an Ubuntu box to pull the sensor data from the Bluetooth-enabled devices and utilizing its built-in webcam for the video. They graph the data for each axis and we’re sure that syncing up data anomalies with the video is just a matter of matching timestamps.

So what good is this? The creators are keeping us in the dark about an end-goal for collected data; this may just be for the experience of using the hardware. But we could see it having uses in making distance runners more efficient, or teaching that bipedal robot how to balance.

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Direct To PCB Etch Resist Printing

February 28, 2011 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

Here’s a step-by-step guide for printing etch resist directly to copper clad boards. Two methods of making printed circuit boards at home have long dominated as the favorites; using photo-resist, and the toner-transfer method. The latter involves printing board artwork on a laser printer and then ironing it onto the copper clad. We’ve seen some efforts to print toner directly to the copper, or to use ink to adhere toner and then heat fuse it, but this hack is the first one we remember seeing that uses an inkjet printer directly.

The best reason inkjet printing isn’t often used is do to the ink’s iability to protect copper from the etchant. This method uses MISPRO ink that is pigment based and will resist the acid. An Epson Stylus Photo R260 printer was chosen because you can get refillable printer cartridges which work with the ink, and they’re fairly easy to modify. In order to feed substrate through the device it needs some physical alteration to make room for the thickness of the material, and an ATtiny13 has been added to trick one of the sensors.

Unfortunately we didn’t find photos of the printed resist. But there is source code available for the tiny13 if you do give this a try.

[Thanks Pavlejo]

Web-enabling Your Smoke Breaks

February 28, 2011 by Mike Szczys 21 Comments

If you’re going to freeze your butt off smoking in the middle of winter you might was well have company while you’re out there. [Zach’s] company wanted to crunch some data about smoking breaks and worker productivity. Instead of just meeting the bland data collection needs he decided to add functionality.

He took time to explain the different parts of the system. Above you can see the web interface that lets you know which of your coworkers are smoking right now. It also lets you click to check in and out from your breaks. After this was up and running he found that often the smokers forgot to ‘clock out’ before a break. As a backup system he build a physical interface on the way out of the office. Each smoker has their own button with a corresponding LED. If the light’s on you’re having a break and when it’s off you’re working. This controller is Arduino based and uses a Perl script to monitor the input and sync both that physical display and the web interface. [Zach] posted a few pictures if you want to take a look at the rest of the system.

2-bit Full Adder Using Just Thirty Six 555 Timers

February 28, 2011 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

This 2-bit adder was a lot of work to build. It uses a total of thirty-six 555 timers and it does have the option of adding or subtracting numbers. It’s a rather unorthodox use of the part, depending more on the chip as an inverter and taking advantage of the fact that there’s an NPN transistor built into it. [cpu86] did use some PNP transistors to give him the ability to turn off some of the 555’s to get everything working correctly.

He explains the use of two’s complement in the subtracting feature but the process is just touched on very quickly. Luckily there’s a huge eagle schematic available with his project writeup so that you can follow along and really grasp how this thing works. We’ve generated a PNG and embedded it after the break for your convenience. You’ll find it just after the two videos of the device in action.

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