Author: James Hobson

1404 Articles

Weather Word Clock Warns You Of Impending Winter

November 8, 2015 by 3 Comments

Word clocks are pretty popular “artsy” ways of telling time, but [doktorinjh] wanted to try something a little different. So instead of showing the time — it shows the weather.

He’s using an Arduino Yun to access the Weather Underground API for data and then sends the data out to a grid of 100 individually addressable RGB LEDs — NeoPixels to be precise. The LEDs are overlayed with a laser cut acrylic sheet with various words and weather icons to allow for a pretty specific depiction of current (or future) weather conditions.

The frame is made out of colonial style molding and since it’s a weather clock, he turned the grid of LEDs into a rainbow effect, because, why not?

Continue reading “Weather Word Clock Warns You Of Impending Winter” →

The Robot Light Switch

November 6, 2015 by 24 Comments

Automating your home is an awesome endeavor — but playing with mains AC can be risky business if you don’t know what you’re doing. So why not play it safe and make use of your light switch?

Admittedly, it wasn’t because [Tyler Bletsch] didn’t want to mess around with AC directly, but rather out of necessity. You see, he just moved into a new office and his “smart” air conditioner… doesn’t turn itself off at night.

There’s a remote control to set the target temperature, but the unit isn’t smart enough to turn off at night. Instead, there’s a physical wall switch so you can turn it off with your actual physical hands, like a barbarian.

Refusing to be a barbarian (and to stay at work late), he decided to simplify the problem by building a servo driven light switch plate. It’s not the prettiest — but it does the trick. Continue reading “The Robot Light Switch” →

Rick’s P-p-portal Gun

November 5, 2015 by 14 Comments

For this Halloween, [Dave Dalton] went all out on his [Rick] costume from the cartoon Rick and Morty. He designed and 3D printed a portal gun. No, not from Portal. Rick’s Portal gun, set for Reality C137.

He built it at Kansas City’s makerspace, called the Hammerspace Workshop. A 3D printed shell closely matches the cartoon depiction of the Portal Gun, but besides looking realistic — it actually works! You see [Dave] actually went and stuffed a pico projector inside so the gun would actually project portals when you use it — with sound effects even.

But our favorite part of the video is probably [Dave’s] excellent imitation of [Rick’s] drunken slurs.

I-i-inside this housing here, we-we-we’ve got all kinds of cool electronic gizmos, we-we got some stuff from Adafruit…

Continue reading “Rick’s P-p-portal Gun” →

Shoot Down Drones With Pumpkin Cannons

November 4, 2015 by 29 Comments

Are you worried about the inevitable drone invasion? Have you been waiting for a defense system that you can trust? Look no further. This video shows just how effective the system is — no smoke and mirrors. Just results.

Forget RF jamming or WiFi hacking. If those devices work at all, they’re probably only good for stopping consumer devices. If you want to be sure that a drone is taken down, you’ll need a pumpkin cannon.

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The Flying Man

November 1, 2015 by 24 Comments

No, that’s not a typo for Burning Man. What do you get when you take a hundred feet of plastic sheet, weld up a big ramp, modify a car into your own personal high speed winch, and put it all near a lake? You get some serious air time.

A group of French water sports enthusiasts decided to build this fantastically ill-advised super slip and slide. They built a giant ramp alongside an old farm house heading towards the lake. At the bottom is a large ramp they welded together out of steel. Now you can just slide down this slip and slide.

But they weren’t content with just that.

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Take A Ride On My Magic Carpet

November 1, 2015 by 12 Comments

For an awesome Halloween edition of [PrankvsPrank], they decided to make a remote controlled “magic carpet” for [Aladdin]. It’s absolutely fantastic.

[PrankvsPrank] isn’t really known for making stuff we’d feature on Hackaday, so they got some help with the project from the [CaseyNeistat] a New York YouTuber. As you can probably guess, at the heart of this magic carpet is actually an electric skateboard. A Boosted Board to be specific– it was a very successful Kickstarter a few years ago.

They built a lightweight frame out of plastic pipe and wrapped fabric around it to make it look like a proper carpet out of the cartoon. Once they had it all set, they took it for a spin through the streets of NYC, catching people’s reactions along the way.

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Zombie Slap Results In Glorious Selfie

October 31, 2015 by No comments

[Donnie Plumly] likes to spice things up at the office around holidays. This Halloween he decided to make an office photo booth — with a bit of a twist. He calls it the Zombie Selfie.

He cast his arm in silicone to make a gruesome zombie hand, which he set up with a vibration sensor. If you touch the arm (he encourages you to slap it), an Arduino picks up the vibration which initiates the picture taking sequence!

He’s using an IR LED with the Arduino to trigger the camera, and then an Eye-Fi card in it automatically transfers it to a computer in a DropBox. An IFTTT script then publishes it to Twitter for all to see under the account @ZombieSelfie! There are some pretty amusing ones already!

And so you can preview your Zombie Selfie, he also threw a monitor up — there’s no going back after the picture is taken though! It’ll be posted straight to Twitter.

When it comes to custom photo booths though, its hard to top this robotic artist who will actually paint your picture for you!