Stealth Peephole Camera Watches Your Front Door

September 17, 2013 by James Hobson 33 Comments

In this week’s links post we mentioned an over-powered DSLR peephole that purportedly cost $4000. So when we saw this tip regarding a relatively inexpensive digital peephole, we thought some of you might be a bit more interested.

The hardware is quite simple; a decent webcam, a Raspberry Pi, and a powered USB hub. The camera gets stripped down to its PCB and hidden inside the door itself. Even if you see this from the inside it’s just a suspicious-looking wire which wouldn’t make most people think a camera was in use.

On the software side of things, [Alex] set up his Raspberry Pi as a 24/7 webcam server to stream the video online. Unlike using a cheap wireless CCTV camera, his video signals are secure. He then runs Motion, a free software motion detector to allow the camera to trigger events when someone comes sneaking by. It can be setup to send you a text, call you, play an alarm, take a picture, record a video… the list goes on. His blog has a full DIY guide if you want to replicate this system. We just hope you have a stronger door!

We covered a similar project back in 2011, but it had made use of real server instead of an inexpensive Raspberry Pi.

[Thanks Alex!]

Electron Tree Bridal Gifts

September 16, 2013 by James Hobson 34 Comments

[Mark] just sent us in this fascinating example of Lichtenberg Figures, or more commonly known as Captured Lightning.

He just got married yesterday to his beautiful wife [Charlie] and they wanted to do something different for their bridal party. They chose to capture lightning inside acrylic spheres. Quite an impressive gift if we do say so ourselves!

The funny thing is, I was just reading [Theo Gray’s] Mad Science book which explains this phenomena. These Lichtenberg Figures are created by blasting a beam of high energy electrons at a piece of acrylic. Many of the electrons get trapped inside the acrylic and form a plane of charge. When the acrylic object gets struck with a grounding stud, a discharge path is formed and all the electrons escape, leaving a completely unique lightning-like path in their tracks.

Unfortunately to make these you’re going to need a linear accelerator; a very expensive machine that [Mark] was lucky enough to use through his work. However the couple didn’t stop there, they also designed the lighted base using a PIC12F1501 micro-controller to finish off the gifts!

See how they were made after the break! Just a heads up, the video is very loud when the electrons are fired! If you’re wearing headphones keep the volume low.

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Disarm: Turning Guns Into A Mechanised Musical Orchestra

September 16, 2013 by James Hobson 45 Comments

[Pedro Reyes] is a visual artist who lives in Mexico City. His most recent project was called ‘Disarm’ – a unique exhibit that combined dismantled weapons with sculpture and technology.

The army in Mexico seizes firearms on a regular basis and they are typically either buried or destroyed. But this time a friend working for the National Crime Prevention Commission thought to ask [Pedro] if he could use them for something. A few hundred non-functional guns later, and [Pedro] has a fully automated mechanical orchestra. The articles don’t go into much information about how it works, but it looks like solenoids are mostly utilized to actuate the various instruments. The entire setup is then controlled by a computer, but there’s not much information on the interface design.

When asked about the project, [Pedro] explained his reasoning: “The beautiful thing about ‘Disarm’ as a project is that it combines music, with sculpture, and at the same time, with technology. This is the redemption of metal that could have taken your life or mine. So they are better as musical instruments.”

Watch the 8 minute documentary on ‘Disarm’ by the Creators Project after the break. The weapon-based orchestra sounds pretty good!

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Tiny Chess Playing Computer

September 15, 2013 by James Hobson 8 Comments

We have covered many chess computers in the past, but we think this might just be the smallest. Enter the PIC Blitz: A tiny low-cost low-power computer that can play lightning chess.

It’s based on a PIC16F628A microcontroller, which only has 3.5kbytes of flash and a mere 224 bytes of RAM. For comparison, Boris (one of the first consumer chess computers), utilized an 8-bit microprocessor with 2.5 kbytes of ROM and 256 bytes of RAM.

PIC Blitz has a full fledged chess library: it knows all the moves, all the basic openings and even changes its evaluation function weights as the game progresses to keep the game interesting. The creator [Mark Owen] quips about some of the additional techniques he utilized to make up for the limited processing power; including “pondering time”, a difficult and slow user interface, and of course, a barely-comprehensible LCD.

If you’re interested he has released the files under Creative Commons, and has a link to the PCB layout on the project page – we won’t link it directly though, since it goes straight to a download.

[Thanks Martin!]

3D Printed Injection Molds

September 15, 2013 by James Hobson 28 Comments

A team at Budapest University has successfully created a functional injection mold for prototyping by using a Stratasys 3D printer.

Prototype injection molds are expensive. They are typically machined out of steel or aluminum which is both costly and time consuming, due to the complex geometries of most molds. [Dr. Jozsef Gabor Kovacs] works in the Department of Polymer Engineering at Budapest University, which is where he came up with the innovative approach of using 3D printing to produce a prototype mold.

The mold was printed in Digital ABS PolyJet Photopolymer plastic using a Objet Connex 3D printer. The injection material used was polyacetal; which has a fairly low melting point of 175°C. By using this method they were able to go from a prototype mold to a test part in less than 24 hours. We don’t even want to think about how expensive that would be to expedite from a machine shop.

After the break you can watch the entire production process from printing to molding.

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SNESoIP: It’s Exactly What It Sounds Like

September 14, 2013 by James Hobson 16 Comments

prototype-small

Here’s a cool hack for those of you wishing to play some retro multiplayer SNES games online!

[Michael Fitzmayer] is a resident hacker at shackspace; der hackerspace in Stuttgart. He’s come up with this clever little ethernet adapter network-bridge that can share local controller-inputs over the internet. The entire project is open-source, and readily available on github. It’s still in the early stage of development, but it is already fully functional. The firmware is small and will fit on an ATmega8, and by the looks of the component list it’s a fairly easy build.

He’s even integrated a switch mode (hold B and Y during boot), which avoids trying to figure out which controller will be player one! After all, don’t you remember untangling the controller cords, trying to figure out which one is which?

We know you had a favorite controller and would give the other “crappy” one to your guest.

Example video is after the break.

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Students Build A 3D Printed Plane

September 13, 2013 by James Hobson 33 Comments

3d printed plane

A student team has successfully designed, built, and flown a 3D printed RC plane using only $16 of plastic with a consumer-grade 3D printer (Makerbot), plus the necessary electronics and motor.

The folks over at the Wright Brothers Institute (WBI) have a great program called the AFRL Discovery Lab which brings teams of students, businesses, researchers, and government together to work on a specific challenge or opportunity.

One of the programs this year was the Disposable Miniature Air Vehicle, or DMAV for short. The student interns [Nathan, Ben, and Brian] spent the first 5 weeks at Tec^Edge designing the plane. The team went through 5 revisions before they settled on a design they believed could fly. The final plane weighed 1.5 pounds, and on its first flight… plummeted into the ground. Good thing they printed a second copy! After some more practice [Stephen] got the hang of it and was able to fly and land the plane successfully.

According to the WBI, this is the first functional aircraft that has been fully 3D printed (sans electronics) using FDM technology, and the first low wing 3D printed plane to be flown. Hate to burst their bubble, but 3D printed quadcopters have been around for quite a while!

Test flight video is after the break.

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