Lighted Fan Pull Saves You From Flailing Around In The Dark

December 9, 2011 by Mike Nathan 25 Comments

lighted-fan-pull

Like many people, [yardleydobon] had a hard time locating his ceiling fan’s pull chain at night when his room is completely dark. Rather than continue to flail around blindly grasping for the chain, he decided to find a way to illuminate it instead.

He started off by disassembling a solar garden light, retaining the solar cell, photoresistor, and batteries. After paring down the electronics to the bare essentials, he mounted them inside a plastic battery storage case which he attached to the outside of the fan’s lamp. [yardleydobon] then ran a pair of wires from the electronics box down to end of the chain, where he added an LED and a translucent pull to diffuse the light.

He admits that it’s not the nicest looking modification around, but it does the job in a pinch. He has some ideas that he may put into play if he has the time to revise the design, and we bet that many of you do as well. If so, be sure to share them in the comments.

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Tiny Audio Switcher Eliminates Repetitive Plug Swapping

December 9, 2011 by Mike Nathan 30 Comments

usb-audio-switcher

[Phil] uses both his computer’s speakers and a set of headphones while working at his desk, but he was growing tired of constantly having to remove the headset from his sound card in order to insert the speaker plug. He’s been meaning to rig something up to make it easier to switch outputs, but never seemed to get around to it until he recently saw this LAN-enabled audio switcher we featured.

His USB-controlled switch features a single audio input and two audio outputs, which he mounted on a nicely done homemade double-sided PCB. The switch can be toggled using any terminal program, sending commands to the on-board ATtiny13A via an FT232R USB to serial UART chip.

The switch’s operation is really quite simple, merely requiring [Phil] to type in the desired audio channel into the terminal. The ATiny and a small relay do the rest, directing the audio to the proper output.

Follow Up: Star Wars Tree Gets An Upgrade

December 9, 2011 by Mike Nathan 2 Comments

We asked, and [Zach] listened.

Earlier this week, we featured a circuit he built which allowed his tiny Star Wars Christmas tree to visually replicate the series’ theme song. Several of you, along with myself, thought it would be far cooler if the tree also played the music to accompany the light show, so [Zach] set off to add that functionality.

Worried that the music would get annoying if it played along with the lights constantly, he tweaked his circuit design to incorporate a piezo buzzer that could be easily switched on and off. After wiring it to the MSP430 driving the light show, he tweaked the program to output signals to both the light string and buzzer simultaneously.

While the light show accurately represented the song, he initially ignored flat and sharp notes as they would be indistinguishable to the eye. In audio form however, the missing notes would be glaringly obvious, so he re-transcribed the sheet music resulting in the video you see below.

If you happened to follow [Zach’s] lead and put one of these together in your own house, be sure to swing by his site and grab the latest code, complete with audio track.

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[DJ Sures] Digs Up Another 80s Robot Toy, Makes It Awesome

December 8, 2011 by Mike Nathan 16 Comments

omnibot-2000

[DJ Sures] just can’t help himself from tinkering with robot toys built in the 80s. This time, he got his hands on an Omnibot-2000 (not to be confused with his other Omnibot hack), and updated it for the 21st century.

After its obligatory run through the dishwasher, the robot was fitted with two heavy duty servos in each arm – one for the shoulder and one at the elbow joint. He added another pair of servos and a head-mounted camera to the robot as well, giving it the ability to look around and navigate through his house.

While these physical modifications are nothing new to [DJ Sures], he wanted the robot’s control scheme to be different than what he has done in the past. Along with the standard autonomous/joystick/Wiimote/voice/iPhone controls that he built into his other projects, he added “visual glyph” control capabilities to the Omnibot. This means that the robot can recognize specific objects and surroundings, giving it the ability to perform context-related tasks.

He’s working on getting the robot to recognize both the refrigerator and living room, in hopes of eventually having the Omnibot to fetch him drinks from the kitchen – that’s something we can totally get behind!

Continue reading to see a pair of videos of the Omnibot-2000 in action, and be sure to visit his site if you’re interested in seeing more.

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Hand Made Carbon Fiber Violin Is A Stunning Work Of Craftsmanship

December 8, 2011 by Mike Nathan 40 Comments

carbon-fiber-violin

Building a violin by hand is no easy task, but constructing one out of carbon fiber is an amazing feat! Carpenter [Ken] had never made a violin before, nor built anything substantial out of carbon fiber, and he figured the best way to learn was by doing.

He spent a good bit of time measuring and drawing out his design before making fiberglass molds of the violin’s front and back plates from carved plaster plugs. The process was extremely time consuming, requiring him to make 10 different infusion-molded carbon fiber body plates before he was satisfied with the sound they produced.

With the larger parts of the violin’s body built, he started on the rib molds, which took him 5 hours apiece to set up before injecting the resin. With the body complete, [Ken] was ready to cut the f holes into the violin – a process that required a lot of time hunched over a tank of water with Dremel in hand.

As you can see in the picture above, the final result is stunning – we just wish we could give it a listen to see if it sounds as good as it looks.

Scam-o-Matic Determines If You Bought Fake SD Cards

December 7, 2011 by Mike Nathan 37 Comments

[Andrew] recently got scammed on an SD card purchase and put together a small tool that can help you determine if you’ve had the wool pulled over your eyes as well.

You see, he purchased a set of MicroSD cards, all of which had an advertised capacity of 4GiB. When he tried to use them, they all failed to write more than about 115MiB of data, so he knew something was up. He sat down with some tools that can be used to check the actual capacity of flash media, but he says they were unbelievably slow to scan the cards.

While he waited for one of the scans to complete, he decided to create a utility of his own that would do the same thing in a fraction of the time. His quick and dirty application, called “Scam-o-Matic”, writes random data to the card, double-checking the written region to ensure that data can be read back. If it finds errors your card is likely either a fake or damaged, but if not, it automatically prepares the media for use.

Obviously this sort of situation is relatively rare, but if you think that you have picked up some shady SD cards, be sure to check out [Andrew’s] Github repository.

Periodic Table Of Swearing Would Even Make A Sailor Blush

December 7, 2011 by Mike Nathan 29 Comments

periodic-table-of-swearing

If you often find yourself at a loss for words in the heat of an argument, perhaps this Periodic Table of Swearing is something you might be interested in. Built as a marketing tool for the British comic “Modern Toss”, the table features over 100 fruit machine (slot machine) buttons, each of which triggers an audio clip of the cheeky word or phrase listed.

The buttons were mounted on a piece of laser-cut MDF which makes up the table’s surface, while all of the wiring and the guts of the machine are neatly tucked away underneath. Clay, the company that actually built the table, doesn’t elaborate a whole heck of a lot on the details other than stating that it includes over 100 meters of wiring, 300 solder joints, and a whole lot of swearing. We imagine it could likely be replicated with a small micro, an SD card reader, and a couple of speakers – for anyone interested in having one of their own.

While it’s not a hack in the strictest sense, we’re sure it’s a great conversation ~~starter~~ ender, and we did get a chuckle out of the demo video below (Warning: Language).

[Thanks, Jack]

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