3D Printing With LEGO

October 18, 2010 by Mike Szczys 27 Comments

With 2400 LEGO bricks and a lot of patience, [Will Gorman] built a LEGO 3D printer. It’s similar to a RepRap or a Makerbot, but instead of extruding plastic, it uses pre-extruded building blocks (aka LEGO bricks). The grey wall extending far above the unit itself is a feed magazine which holds the raw material. A Java application takes an MLCad file and translates it into building instructions for the printer. Those instructions are then sent to the device via USB. See it happen after the break.

Now this just needs to be combined with the LEGO sorting machine for an inexhaustible supply of bricks.

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Data Plotting For The Visually Impaired

October 18, 2010 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

This setup helps to represent data in a meaningful way to for visually impaired people. It uses a combination of physical objects to represent data clusters, and audio feedback when manipulating those objects. In the video after the break you’ll see that the cubes can orient themselves to represent data clusters. The table top acts as a graphing field, with a textured border as a reference for the user. A camera mounted below the clear surface allows image processing software to calculate the locations for the cubes. Each cube is motorized and contains an Arduino and ZigBee module, listening for positioning information from the computer that is doing the video processing. Once in position, the user can move the cubes, with modulated noise as a measure of how near they are to the heart of each data cluster.

The team plans to conduct further study on the usefulness of this interactive data object. We certainly see potential for hacking as this uses off-the-shelf components that are both inexpensive, and easy to find. It certainly reminds us of a multitouch display with added physical tokens.

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Halloween Props: Dancing Spider

October 18, 2010 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

[Isaac] grabbed the motor from an old printer and used it to make a spider run up and down the wall for Halloween. A PIC 12F683 uses a MOSFET to drive the motor. The program loop has a little bit of dramatic flare to it, raising the arachnid with a bit of a jerky motion to give it some life, then wait for a time before quietly lowering the spider (hopefully onto an unsuspecting party-goer). The driver board is set up for two motors, making it easy to reuse in future projects. This is quite effective, and the only addition we might suggest is to add a couple of red LEDs as some glowing eyes.

Take a look at the finished product after the break.

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Hackaday Links: October 17, 2010

October 17, 2010 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

Cards you should crank

These greeting cards must be the product of a mechanical engineer run amok. They come with a crank and are designed to entertain with their simple, yet elegant movements. [Thanks Phil]

Magnetic card stripe reader

[JP] built an Arduino based magnetic card reader. It uses off-the-shelf parts but if you don’t mind buying the components this will get you up and running in no time. If you want more info there’s also this Teensy based version.

Homemade Airsoft sentry gun

This sentry gun has an amazingly fast firing rate that can continue for quite a while, thanks to the big flashlight housing that is holds a lot of ammo. [Thanks David]

Scanner easter egg

The engineers over at HP had a little fun building an easter egg into this scanner. If you know what you’re doing you can get it to play the Ode to Joy. It needs to join the old-hardware band from our Links post earlier in the month. [Thanks Googfan]

Master Clock System Uses All Logic, No Microcontrollers

October 17, 2010 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

What you see above is a master clock. It is the center of a system that can run an unlimited number of slave clocks, keeping them on-time thanks to its ability to synchronize with an atomic clock. [Brett Oliver] put together the project back in 2005 using digital logic chips, and no programmable microcontrollers. This includes everything from the binary decoders that drive the 7-segment displays, to the radio transceiver board that gathers the atomic clock data, to the various dividers that output 1 second, 2 second, 30 second, 1 minute, 1 hour, and 24 hour signal pulses. It’s a well document and fascinating read if you’re interested in digital logic clocks.

Gesture Controlled Robotic Hand

October 17, 2010 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

Inspired by the control system for the AMP suits in the movie Avatar, [Feelpavan] built this gesture controlled robotic hand. So far there is functionality for the wrists to rotate and bend, as well as for the fingers to flex (but not individually). This is accomplished by three servo motors on the hand assembly. The instructions for the hand are gathered from your own hand, through the use of an accelerometer and an Arduino that he built himself. Check it out after the break.

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Live Action Fighting Games

October 17, 2010 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

Here’s a strange one. This fighting game uses a video game interface to instruct modern-age gladiators on how to bring the pain. The costumed fighters cannot see anything other than a set of lights in their helmets instructing them to move or punch. A camera films them and overlays the footage on a digital background along with simulated blood and a health bar for each. NES controllers are used to instruct them, and switches inside the costumes register the pummeling they receive and deduct health accordingly. This wouldn’t be any good without a demonstration, which we’ve embedded after the break.

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