Author: James Hobson

1404 Articles

motorized sleigh

Dogless Dog Sleigh Is Perfect For Your Winter Commute

February 26, 2015 by 16 Comments

It’s a wee bit cold in Finland right now. And while dog sledding is always an option (though mostly for tourists), one gentleman who goes by [Jibjorkl] on YouTube decided to try making his own motorized sleigh — and it’s freaking awesome.

Unfortunately our Finnish language skills aren’t exactly up to snuff so we’ll just have to describe the invention; perhaps one of our Finnish readers could add some insight if we miss anything?

It appears that [Jibjorkl] has taken a hub motor with a wheel from a standard e-bike and mounted on what looks like a store-bought sleigh. The wheel has something which looks kind of like duct tape wrapped around it to help give it extra traction in the snow. There are two lead-acid batteries sitting atop the motor assembly, but we can see an e-bike Li-on pack mounted on the side too (likely 48V 20+aH).

Regardless of how it works — it’ll take two passengers pretty damn fast through the snow. We want to build one asap.

Continue reading “Dogless Dog Sleigh Is Perfect For Your Winter Commute” →

IOT Lightbulb hack

Repurposing IOT Lightbulb Chip For Anything

February 15, 2015 by 27 Comments

Home automation products have hit critical mass in the world of consumerism, and now suddenly everyone has a product you can control using some protocol or other. Cree (the maker of LEDs) has a rather cheap IOT-enabled bulb available in Canada and the US for the low price of $15 — not bad considering regular LED bulbs can run you that much, without wireless connectivity!

So if you want to outfit your house in smart lights — great. But what about other things? Well, [Mac Alpine] decided to crack open one of the bulbs to see if he could re-purpose the IOT board. Turns out, you can.

In fact it’s almost too convenient. It’s a remarkably small chip, about half the size of a silver dollar. And it features a small ZigBee radio module. All you need is a 3V power supply, and boom — you have an IOT module that is capable of PWM output. It features an Atmel ATSAMR21E microprocessor which communicates over the radio to a Quirky Wink hub — it can also be triggered using IFTTT.

Continue reading “Repurposing IOT Lightbulb Chip For Anything” →

3D Printed Snowblower

Automate Winter With A 3D Printed Snowblower

February 14, 2015 by 25 Comments

Remote controlled vehicles aren’t just for kids. In fact, you can get some seriously cool mini utility vehicles. In fact, you can even buy a mini tracked snow blowing vehicle! But [The_Great_Moo] was rather disappointed in the performance of his Kyosho Blizzard SR, so he did what any self-respecting hacker would — he redesigned the whole damn thing and 3D printed it.

The beauty with re-designing something from the ground up is you can design it specifically for 3D printing (unless of course you want to mass produce it!), so [The_Great_Moo] took his time and built all his parts with layer strength in mind. The large parts are printed at 0.4mm resolution, and the finer parts; like gears and shafts, are printed at 0.2mm resolution. He printed everything off using his Da Vinci 1.0 printer, and it apparently only took 40 hours!

Besides bolts and nuts everything is 3D printed — even the timing belt gears and gearbox! But the real question is… can it really blow snow. You’ll have to watch the video to find out.

Continue reading “Automate Winter With A 3D Printed Snowblower” →

DJ Light Box Grooves To The Beat

February 4, 2015 by 2 Comments

During a Product Design class, [Oscar de la Hera] designed and built an LED light box that responds to music — and looks good doing it!

He carefully constructed the box out of Oak with a one-way mirror top, enclosing a 6 x 6 matrix array of NeoPixels. Behind the panel is an Arduino Uno which uses an MSGEQ7 chip and two audio jacks to take in an audio signal and create a light show. When the lights are off, it looks like a fancy little mirror — but when you turn on the music it becomes alive.

If you’re curious on how it was made, or if you want to make your own, there’s a full tutorial on how to make your own over at Instructables — and don’t forget to take a look at it in action after the break!

Continue reading “DJ Light Box Grooves To The Beat” →

A Simple But Elegant Time-Lapse Camera Slider

February 4, 2015 by 9 Comments

Time-lapse photography is always a fun way to show off the build process of a project – but sometimes it can get a bit boring and repetitive. To add a new dynamic, why not try a moving time-lapse? It’s not actually that hard to build a time-lapse slider rig. And you can do it with, or without a microcontroller.

[Charlie] built this slider rig out of square aluminum tube stock which is cheap and easy to work with. It’s also a great candidate for using pop-rivets which can speed up the assembly considerably. The camera bogey uses aluminum angle stock with skateboard bearings to ride along the track. Altogether the rig is four feet long and about 6″ wide.

To pull the camera back and forth, [Charlie] has a 0.5RPM geared motor from Servo-City which results in a travel time of about 5400 seconds (90 minutes). While there aren’t any demo videos of the rig in action, we imagine it’d produce some pretty clean motion. And thanks to its rigid construction, the camera can be pulled upside down, on angles, and even vertically.

backpack stereo

SnoTunes Lets You Rock Out In The Winter

February 3, 2015 by 24 Comments

[Matt Bilsky], an avid reader of Hackaday for years, finally gathered up the courage to submit a project to us. We swear, we don’t byte! Anyway — we’re glad he did, because his project is absolutely awesome. He calls it SnoTunes and it’s a backpack stereo system designed for the outdoors.

It’s a whopping 160 watt stereo, has 7-8 hours of battery life, is somewhat water resistant, and can be controlled wirelessly. Its brain is a Raspberry Pi B+ running Kodi (which was formerly XBMC). A 7″ display is hidden inside of the backpack for more fine tuning controls.

It fetches and downloads YouTube music videos and can create a playlist that can be manipulated by text message. You can share YouTube links to have it download and queue the songs, you can skip the songs (but only if four people make the request), and it even automatically parses the music video titles to extract the song name and band. It also works with AirPlay — but who even uses that.

Continue reading “SnoTunes Lets You Rock Out In The Winter” →

Nexus 7 Dash

Suburu Dash Mounted Nexus 7 Looks Like Stock

February 2, 2015 by 40 Comments

Nexus 7 tablets, being cheap and really quite decent for the price, have long since been used in the dashboards of people’s cars. Sometimes they’re mounted quite good — sometimes not so good — but every once in a while, someone gets it right.

Usually the reason mods like this don’t work out so well is because people are worried about damaging their car’s interior. But [tsubie320] had a better idea — buy a radio bezel off eBay to mess around with — that way he can always revert to stock when he sells the vehicle.

With a crisp-new-freshly-injection-molded-bezel in hand, he got to work. Funny enough, Nexus 7’s tend to be almost the exact size of double DIN stereo slots — hence their appeal. He wrapped the tablet in blue painter’s tape and positioned it in the bezel. Using fiberglass, he created a new shell for the tablet to sit inside of the bezel. Lots of sandpaper later and a whole bunch of bondo, he was done. Continue reading “Suburu Dash Mounted Nexus 7 Looks Like Stock” →