Author: James Hobson

1404 Articles

BTTF Alarm Clock

Back To The Future Alarm Clock Is As Real As It Gets

October 24, 2015 by 14 Comments

While real time-travel is obviously not happening anytime soon, with this Back to the Future themed alarm clock, you can go to the future in seven hour eight hour increments by going to sleep. Great Scott!

[CrossleyAcoustics] spent the past few months designing and building this movie-prop worthy alarm clock, and it certainly shows. After designing everything on breadboards, he had custom PCBs made, he modeled the whole thing in Sketchup (first time he’s used it!) and even tried his hand at the sheet metal fabrication after shops quoted him thousands for what he wanted.

The coolest part of the build is that [CrossleyAcoustics] had some detailed drawings that he had made himself… when he was 8 years old. Talk about a plan coming together!

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Radio Jamming Rifle Claimed To Disable Drones

October 24, 2015 by 77 Comments

[Battelle], an Ohio-based non-profit R&D firm has just unveiled a device they call the DroneDefender — a long-range anti-drone defense weapon. It almost sounds like they’ve brought the fictional drone hunter’s RF cannon to life. But does it really work?

According to the site, it uses radio frequency disruption to blast unwanted drones out of the sky. Cool concept, but does it actually work? Unlike the hackable MAVLink protocol used by Parrot AR, ArduPilot and a handful of other consumer drones, this weapon uses brute radio signal force to disable any(?) consumer drone.

There’s a video after the break demonstrating a simulated use of the technology, which leaves us a bit confused. They show the drone slowly landing all nicely after being “guided” down by the rifle. If the system is jamming both GPS and the 2.4 GHz control link, the behavior will all depend on the software loaded on the drone. Some will go to a fail-safe mode, which is low throttle or motor power off, assuming the pilot has set fail-safe. Others may attempt to loiter on IMU sensors only.

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Making A Crossbow For The Zombie Apocalypse

October 23, 2015 by 27 Comments

Curious if he could, [Gignathiosis] decided he wanted to try building his own crossbow. So he did.

He built the entire weapon using hand-tools, minus a drill for the holes, though he could have gotten a brace for that bit. The most impressive part is that he used a hacksaw to carve up a block of aluminum into the trigger release — a job normally done by a mill. The only modern components on the bow is the limb (which he ordered off Amazon) and a bit of tactical rail for his scope. The end result is a gorgeous hand-made cross-bow.

There’s just something so satisfying about manufacturing old technology using hand tools. It probably has something to do with the thought that, if you ended up back in time somehow, you could use your 21st century knowledge as a hacker to change the world… and maybe become a ruler — or a magician — as long as you don’t do something that results in your entire existence vanishing.

Though if you really wanted to mess up history — take back a fully-automatic crossbow with you instead.

Leap Motion Arduino Control

Leap Motion Wirelessly Controlling A Prosthetic Hand With An Arduino

October 22, 2015 by 8 Comments

The Leap Motion controller is a rather impressive little sensor bar that is capable of generating a massive 3D point cloud and recognizing hands and fingers to allow for gesture control based computing. It’s been out for a few years now but we haven’t seen many hackers playing with it. [Anwaarullah] has messed around with it before, but when it came time to submit something for India’s first Maker Faire, he decided to try doing an actual project with it.

Checking out the latest Leap Motion SDK, [Anwaarullah] realized many improvements had been made and he’d have to rewrite some of his original code to reflect the changes. This time around he’s opted to use the ESP8266 WiFi module instead of a Bluetooth one. He printed off a Raptor hand (from the wonderful folks at e-NABLE) and hooked it up with some RC servos to give him a nice robotic hand to control.

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Laptop hardware hack

Laptop’s Aren’t Upgradable? Ha!

October 20, 2015 by 45 Comments

[MX372] is a pretty dedicated hardware hacker. Instead of chucking a 10 year old laptop with specs weaker than his latest cellphone — he decided to breath new life into it with a few hardware upgrades, and a switch to Linux of course.

Featuring a 1.1GHz Pentium M processor with a whopping 512mb DDR RAM, a dvd burner, a 40GB HDD, USB 2.0, BlueTooth, 802.11b/g wireless and even a FireWire port, his old Sony Vaio used to command a pretty hefty price tag. In fact, he’s pretty sure he paid $2,100 for it back in ’05. It was called an “ultrabook” before ultrabook actually meant a MacBook-Air sized laptop.

Still running Windows XP, it had gotten slower with age as all good computers do, and since XP is no longer supported, [MX372] thought it was time to switch it over to Linux. He started with Xubuntu 12, but quickly found Lubuntu instead. But, it still wasn’t that great. Continue reading “Laptop’s Aren’t Upgradable? Ha!” →

Twisty Glider

RC Glider Flies By Twisting Its Wings

October 20, 2015 by 28 Comments

Remote control gliders typically fly like their full-size counterparts. Tail and wing rudders control the direction of flight — but what if the wings themselves could twist and change their profile, similar to that of a bird? Well, RC glider manufacturer [Jaro Müller] did just that — and it is pretty cool (You’ll need a translation to read it though).

Called the Mini Ellipse, the RC glider is designed to be able to fly in slow thermals and maneuver even better than previous models. The entire wing profile can be controlled by wing flexion — the wing itself is very flexible. Unfortunately we don’t have any info about how it actually goes about doing that, but it’s probably either servo motors pulling wires, or maybe nitinol memory wire… but we’re just guessing. Regardless — take a look at the following video and let us know what you think!

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Potato Battery Cell

The Practical Potato Cell

October 18, 2015 by 32 Comments

Potato batteries, lemon batteries, they’re all good fun for the classroom — but is there a way of making them better? [Marcel Varallo] decided to give it a shot — and we gotta admit, it’s a pretty cool idea!

Normally for these fruit and vegetable batteries you poke some leads into the battery, connect it to a clock, and bob’s your uncle. But what if we made them resemble batteries? [Marcel] took some copper pipe, cut it down to size, and poked it through a potato. Now he had a potato-cored, copper tube. Stick a zinc nail in the middle, and you’ve got yourself a battery cell! Or as [Marcel] likes to put it.. a Mar-Cell. Or the more scientific term.. the Solanum tuberosum based electron differencer V1.0.

Each potato cell produces approximately 0.8V, so if you throw eight in series, you’ll have the equivalent of a 6V battery, just maybe not the same mAh rating.

For another cool way to demonstrate electricity to youngsters, we love this lemon battery hack — it’s actually quite elegant.