Kinetic Sculpture Takes A Page From Modern Life

December 20, 2010 by Mike Szczys 24 Comments

The blurry image above is a snap of toy cars as they zoom around a multi-lane, multi-level, maniacal-maze called Metropolis II. We originally took a look at the video after the break (do it now!) but found more information on [Chris Burden’s] kenetic sculpture in this NYT article. He and eight studio artists began work on the project back in 2006. They built 1200 custom designed cars and gave them a huge city to traverse, with up to 18 lanes at times. The work is not yet done, and the video below is dated (having been filmed in 2009), but project is slated to conclude in about two months and the installation has already been snapped up by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

And here we thought this was the product of an out-of-work packaging system design engineer. Nope, it’s art, and it certainly eclipses other kinetic sculptures we’ve seen.

Continue reading “Kinetic Sculpture Takes A Page From Modern Life” →

Hackaday Unleashes A Troll Sniffing Rat

December 19, 2010 by Mike Szczys 79 Comments

Sometimes we like to take a few minutes away from Hackaday to spend time with our families. But just when you take your eyes off of the incoming comments, Trolls are bound to strike. Well, [Caleb] and I found a solution to the problem in the form of a troll sniffing rat. This beady-eyed vermin sits on my desk and waits. When a trolling comment is detected its eyes glow red and an alarm is sounded. Join us after the break for more about this silly project.

Continue reading “Hackaday Unleashes A Troll Sniffing Rat” →

This Fire Extinguisher Serves Frothy Beverages

December 19, 2010 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

[Ben Krasnow’s] friends always want him to bring a fire extinguisher to their parties, not for safety reasons, but to quench their thirst. You see, [Ben] uses old fire extinguishers as kegs for his home-brewed beer. They’re not all that different from the Cornelius kegs that most home brew setups use; they’re intended to dispense liquids under pressure, include a liquid exhaust valve, and a gas pressure valve. All he had to do was clean the stainless steel parts extremely well, replace the gaskets, and modify the input valve to use a quick connect for his CO2 system. For good measure he also added a low pressure meter to let you know the carbonation level.

Recently, he installed a home tap system that uses two of the extinguisher kegs. Our favorite part is the refrigerated hose loop that uses a fan to circulate cold air from the fridge all the way to taps.

Keep Your Kids In Line With A Time Clock

December 19, 2010 by Mike Szczys 68 Comments

When the cat’s away the mice will play, but a least you’ll know when they came home if you use this time clock. It’s called the Kid-e-log and [John Boxall] developed it to help a friend who wanted to keep track of their teenage children’s after school activities while they were still at work. He figured having them punch a time clock would at least let you know if they came straight home as they were supposed to. An RFID tag was issued to each (no, they didn’t implant the tags) and used to record the time. To keep fraud to a minimum the hardware has a battery back-up for its real-time clock, and the tag read events are stored to EEPROM for retention between power cycles. This doesn’t prevent common tricks like taking the reader with you, or sending your tag with a sibling, but it’s a start. See it in action after the break.

Continue reading “Keep Your Kids In Line With A Time Clock” →

Lifehacker’s Top Ten Of 2010

December 19, 2010 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

The end is near and Lifehacker is looking back on their favorite how-to articles from 2010. We found at least half of these interesting, including the hidden HTPC, lockpicking, and micro-TV-b-gone showcased in the image above. But you can also find tips on using your WRT54G router, stacking malted beverages, and making things glow through chemistry. If your heart goes out to our plague carrying house-mates there’s a no-kill mouse trap. They’ve even included a hack to add a USB port to your car… an article which we covered back in 2009. Enjoy!

Making MSATA Work With Mini PCI Express

December 18, 2010 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

[Trucki] wanted to upgrade the internal storage on his JooJoo. There’s an mSATA connector inside but devices that use that protocol are hard to come by and when you do they’ll cost you and arm and a leg. He knew he could get solid state drives cheaply that use the mini PCI Express standard, which is mechanically compatible with mSATA. So he set out to alter a mini PCI Express device to work with the mSATA protocol. This entails swapping the transmission lines and rearranging the voltage traces on the connector. To handle the TX- and TX+ lines he desoldered their decoupling capacitors and realigned them to trade their signals. For the 3.3V lines he had to cut the feed and solder jumper wire to the correct pads.

This is some nice work which let him add a 32 GB drive for just sixty Euros. Since the device only comes with a 4 GB SSD an upgrade is almost mandatory if you’re planning to install an alternate OS on the Joojoo.

Domino Clock Uses An Electromechanical Display

December 18, 2010 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

This clock concept uses big dominos with changing faces to display the time. As far as we can tell they haven’t made it through to a finished product yet, but we loved the explaination of the engineering that went into the prototype. After the break you can watch [Eric] explain how he accomplished the design requirements of a slowly changing digit that uses no power to keep its state, which also uses low-power when changing state. To accomplish this he designed a flipping circle that stays put in both the white and black positions once set. When it’s time to change the digits, a coil is energized to push against a magnet in what he calls a single poled motor. Whatever the name, we want to build one ourselves!

Continue reading “Domino Clock Uses An Electromechanical Display” →