Ancient TV Remote Becomes A CNC Pendant

May 26, 2014 by James Hobson 2 Comments

DIY CNC Pendant

Needing a control pendant for his CNC machine, [Bob Davis] took to his scrap bin and started looking for parts. What he came up with is pretty cool — that’s a rather old Zenith TV remote providing the enclosure!

When building a homemade CNC machine, many people overlook one of the most handy components — the control pendant. On a commercial machine, they can get pretty pricey — on a homemade machine, most people just use the computer to control it, but if you’ve used a pendant before you know how handy they are for manual operations!

So what should you do? Well, you could make a second dedicated keyboard for your CNC machine (arguably not much of a hack, but rather clever) — or you could build a pendant from scratch like [Bob] did. It’s pretty simple; he’s using a 555 timer, a few momentary toggle switches, an LED, and plans to add a potentiometer in the future for speed control. It’s all housed in the old TV remote, and seems to do the trick just fine — take a look in the following video:

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Introducing The Flux Buggy — A Serious Electric Dune Buggy Conversion

May 25, 2014 by James Hobson 61 Comments

Believe it or not, the writers here at Hack a Day do their own projects too, we don’t just write about yours! I’ve just started a new project, and I want your advice! A few friends and I are converting a custom-made dune buggy — to electric.

The project will be chronicled over on Hackaday.io, with (hopefully) weekly updates on our progress. If you’ve been perusing Projects, you may have noticed my Electric Car conversion from a few years ago. First year of my engineering degree, my friend and I converted a 1993 Honda Del Sol to electric, using the guts of an electric forklift.

We got it going over 100km/h on used batteries our school donated to us. Unfortunately, there was a bit too much red tape and bureaucracy for us to get it on the road legally. That and we were poor university students who couldn’t afford new batteries, or the ridiculous amount insurance companies wanted to put it on the road. The project got scrapped after sitting in the backyard for a few years.

Fast forward to today, and we’ve both graduated and are working our “cushy” engineering jobs, and for the first time in our lives, we have some disposable income. We needed a new project to work on.

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PVC Percussion Pipe Organ Sounds Surprisingly Good!

May 25, 2014 by James Hobson 31 Comments

PVC Instrument

Using over 20′ feet of PVC pipe, a whole bunch of 2 x 4’s and a few nuts and bolts, [Jeremy] and his cousin put together a rather unique percussion pipe organ.

[Jackson], his cousin who is a musician is always looking for different ways to make music. They had a rough idea of what they wanted to do with a few sketches, but after a day of tinkering, they ended up with something completely different — but it sounds awesome.

The frame is made of a combination of 2 x 6’s and 2 x 4’s which hold the PVC tubes in place. PVC elbows and varying lengths of pipe create a wide range of rather deep bass notes. It can be played with just your hands, or even a pair of sandals for better effect. You’d be surprised how good it sounds.

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Synergizer: The Emergency Key-Turn Barbot

May 25, 2014 by James Hobson 10 Comments

Synergizer: Emergency Drink Dispenser

It’s been a rough day at the office. You need a break. But by yourself? No, what you need is to be Synergized! This Barbot only works if all four keys are inserted and turned — kind of like a nuclear launch procedure — only then will it dispense four perfectly sized drinks to make your day better.

The Synergizer uses an Arduino to control a belt driven linear actuator which moves the spout from cup to cup. A series of reed switches along the length provide feedback to the system for positional control. The machine makes use of a peristaltic pump, called the Bartendro Dispenser, which pumps an exact volume of your liquid of choice into each cup. The cool thing with peristaltic pumps is they are self priming,and capable of pumping an exact volume of liquid every time.

[Nick Poole], the designer, also included a CPU fan and heat-sink paired up with a peltier plate in order to also chill the liquid as it is being pumped. To make it even more interesting, he added a four key override, so the Synergizer can only be used if all four unique keys are inserted.

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Smile Meter Reacts To Your Expressions With Pharrell’s Happy

May 24, 2014 by James Hobson 2 Comments

MIT's Smile Meter

Here’s a clever use of a webcam and some facial recognition software — They call it Happy ++ and it will DJ [Pharrell’s] Happy according to how much you’re smiling (or not at all!).

It’s another project to come out of MIT’s Media Lab for a spring event this year by [Rob, Dan & Javier]. The facial tracking software was re-used from an older project, the MIT Mood Meter, which was a clever installation that had several zones on campus tracking the apparent “happiness” of the students walking by.

To create the program they’ve split up the song Happy into its various components. Drums, vocals, band, and the full mix. As the webcam recognizes a smile, it records the intensity, which in turn turns up the vocals and band. If no smiling is present there is only a drum beat. Continue reading “Smile Meter Reacts To Your Expressions With Pharrell’s Happy” →

Electromagnetic Boots For All Your Upside Down Needs!

May 23, 2014 by James Hobson 43 Comments

magnet boots

X-Men: Days of Future Past is making its way to theaters around the world, and [Mr. Furze] has released his second X-Men related hack — Magneto Boots.

In case you missed it, [Colin Furze] has made three projects to celebrate geekdom and a mastery of fabrication for all the comic book fans out there. He started with the fully functional pneumatic Wolverine Claws, and now he’s tackling Magneto’s powers. The third project isn’t out quite yet, but we can’t wait to see the final installment!

Now the problem with Magneto is his powers are a wee bit too… magical? Without special effects, you can’t really replicate his mutant abilities (please prove us wrong if you can!), so [Colin] decided to do the next best thing. Magnetize himself — well, his shoes.

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CastAR And Holographic Print Preview For 3D Printers!

May 23, 2014 by James Hobson 18 Comments

CastAR and 3D printing

Google glasses this, Oculus rift that, CastAR… With all these new vision devices coming out, the world of augmented reality is fast becoming, well, a reality!

Here’s a really cool concept [Ryan Smith] came up for 3D printing. Using [Jeri Ellsworth’s] CastAR, [Ryan Smith] has created a really cool technical illusion to demonstrate visual prototyping on his Makerbot. Using a laser cutter he’s perforated the front plastic panel of the Makerbot, which allows a semi-transparent overlay that when you use the CastAR’s projector it gives you a holographic visual effect.

The glasses track the reference object (in this case, the gear) and then project interfacing gears in an animation over-top of the existing part. [Ryan] sees this as the next step in 3D printing for artists and makers because it can help give you a 3D preview of your part, for example if you’re not fully sure what scale you want it to print at, you could actually put a mating object, or your hand, behind the screen and visually see the interface!
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