Robot Chameleon Teaches Little Girl About Camouflage

February 7, 2014 by James Hobson 11 Comments

[Markus] has been teaching his daughter about animals using a big old animal encyclopedia. A few days ago, they stumbled upon the chameleon, and when he tried to explain its camouflage abilities, she didn’t quite understand. So he decided to make her a pet color-changing chameleon robot. The best part is he built it during her nap!

It’s a fairly simple circuit consisting of an Arduino Uno, a TCS3200 color sensor with breakout board, a ping pong ball, some resistors, and an RGB LED. He plans on adding temperature sensing as well as a capacitive sensor for touch later on. So far, his daughter loves it and plays with it all the time. She’s starting to learn how some chameleons can change their skin color in order to camouflage — and she’s learning the names of some new colors too!

As always, there’s a demonstration video following the break.

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Turning A Broken Laptop’s LCD Into A Fancy Monitor

February 6, 2014 by James Hobson 59 Comments

Seems like you can find broken laptops everywhere these days — so why not do something with them? [Damutsch] shows us how to make a rather cool looking monitor from a laptop’s LCD display.

First, you’ll need to salvage a working LCD from a dead laptop. Once you have the panel out you can identify the serial key and order a controller board off eBay, which will allow you to plug a normal video input such as VGA or HDMI into the panel. We browsed around a bit and it looks like you can get driver boards from around $15-$30, so not too bad price-wise. It wasn’t so long ago that salvaged LCD panels were basically unusable because of a lack of these driver boards. Continue reading “Turning A Broken Laptop’s LCD Into A Fancy Monitor” →

Plastic Recycling At Home Promises A Revolution In Local Plastic Production

February 6, 2014 by James Hobson 73 Comments

[Dave Hakkens] graduated from the Design Academy of Eindhoven and decided to try his hand at making affordable plastic recycling machines.

His reasoning?

“We recycle just 10% [of waste plastic],” says Hakkens. “I wondered why we recycle so little so I investigated it. I went to all these companies and I realized that they don’t really want to use recycled plastic. So I wanted to make my own tools so I could use recycled plastic locally.”

Typical plastic production, like injection molding, uses very large and expensive machines — so expensive that most of the time, companies don’t want to risk using inferior recycled plastic, as it might damage the machine, or slow production time. Not convinced that recycled plastic is “inferior”, [Dave] has built his own line of machines capable of making recycled plastic parts.

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The Beginning Of A DIY Vehicle Night Vision System

February 5, 2014 by James Hobson 57 Comments

night vision car

[Stephen] has just shared with us the current progress of his night vision vehicle system, and it’s looking quite promising!

The idea of the project is to provide the driver with a high contrast image of the road, pedestrians and any other obstacles that may not be immediately visible with headlights. It’s actually becoming a feature on many luxury cars including BMW, Audi, GM and Honda. This is what inspired [Stephen] to try making his own.

The current system consists of an infrared camera, two powerful IR light spot lights, and a dashboard LCD screen to view it. It may be considered “not a hack” by some of our more exuberant readers, but [Stephen] does such a great job explaining his future plans for it, which include object recognition using OpenCV, so we felt it was more than worth a share, even at this point.

You see, the idea of vehicle night vision is not to constantly watch a little screen instead of the road — it’s designed to be there when you need it — and to let you know when you need it, [Stephen’s] planning on adding a Raspberry Pi to the mix running OpenCV to detect any anomalies on the road that could be of concern. We shudder at the amount of training a system like that might need — well, depending on the complexity of this image recognition.

Anyway, stick around after the break to hear [Stephen] explain it himself — it is a long video, but if you want to skip to the action there are clips of it on the road at 1:53 and 26:52.

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Cassapa: Augmented Pool

February 5, 2014 by James Hobson 48 Comments

cassapa_4

No good at pool? Never fear, Cassapa is here! [Alex Porto] has created an augmented reality system for playing pool, and it means almost anyone can make those cool trick shots!

Ca-what? Cassapa (“caçapa”) is a Portuguese word for pool table pocket. The software works by placing a webcam directly above the pool table for image recognition. Dedicated software interprets the image and identifies the position of the holes, borders, balls and the cue which can then be used to calculate game physics. A projector then projects the forecast physics and allows you to make tiny adjustments — updated in real-time — to make the perfect shot.

Unfortunately, having a big projector shining down on your pool table won’t exactly make anyone believe you’re actually good at pool. Although if you could combine this with Google Glass or any other vision augmenting goggles… that would be pretty cool. Well, you’d still be terribly dishonest and a cheater — but anyway, take a look at the video after the break.

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Hidden Pantry Compartment Opens With A Puzzle!

February 5, 2014 by James Hobson 20 Comments

winerack

What’s the number one thing kids always dream about for when they have their own house someday? Hidden passages? Revolving bookcases? Closets that lead to Narnia? Secret compartments? Well, [TracRat] has lived out at least one of those dreams by making his very own Myst inspired hidden pantry compartment!

His pantry is located under the stairs and to make use of the awkward space, he decided to build a wine rack. He still had a lot of unused space so he decided to take it a step further. He’s built a wooden puzzle combination lock consisting of four colored knobs that slide back and forth in grooves. When the correct combination is made, pressing on the square symbol at the top rolls the entire wine rack backwards, exposing a secret side cabinet. It’s an absolutely gorgeous piece of woodwork and we’re totally impressed by the perfect execution of it.

Do you love Myst too? Check out this awesome Myst inspired Myst(ery) box [Michael] made for his girlfriend’s birthday! Or how about a leather-bound Myst book that lets you play Myst on a computer inside of it!

Nimble Dodgebot Is Super Skittish

February 4, 2014 by James Hobson 10 Comments

For one of [Aron’s] recent robotics modules at college he was tasked with building a small robot. He decided to make project Dodgebot, a cute and extremely quick robot that won’t run into things!

The body is made of perforated steel and supports the motor boxes with wheels (stolen from a toy perhaps?), two IR sensors, and the tidy protoboard on top to contain the electronics — seriously check out the wiring on it!

To control it he’s using an 18-pin dsPIC30F3012 and a SN754410NE driver. The robot works by detecting different states based on the distance measurements from each sensor, and then varying the output to each motor. It’s extremely quick and quite fun to watch as it seems to dodge everything in its path! See for yourself, after the break.

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