Arduino + Nunchuck +espresso = Awesome


Remember the voltage detector that I mentioned a while back? [Tim] hasn’t put up quite enough info to make me happy, but definitely enough to make me jealous. He updated his NES controlled Silvia to become a Wii nunchuck controlled (via Arduino) Silvia. That said, his last couple of blog posts have me questioning just how much espresso he’s been drinking. Theoretically, he could actually program the Silvia to refuse shots to people who are too jittery.

Quick And Easy CNC Setup Tricks

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc-9gTFj-y4&hl=en]
I was considering a laser cross-hair for my mill and found this video of some great setup hacks that [Greolt] put on his mill. The video is pretty short, but I’ll fill you in just in case you don’t want to play/load it. A laser cross-hair is mounted at a known offset to align the X and Y axis. A PC board is wired to a sensor to zero in the Z axis. When the bit makes contact, the machine knows that it’s at 0 + the PCB thickness. A shuttle pro controller adds jog controls and a macro takes care of moving the bit to the zero that was measured with the laser cross-hair. You can find more details on his zero touch setup here.

DIY PC Gaming Gun


[rustlabs] put together an interesting looking gaming gun for FPS games. He wrote up his build and how to use a webcam to provide gun tracking for games like Half Life 2. He gutted a keyboard to provide the button interface, and infrared LEDs on the gun body are tracked by the cam. Surprisingly, no USB game pads were sacrificed in the build, just a USB keyboard and mouse.

Thermal Testing Electronics For Outer Space


[3ricj] wrote up how to build your own low temperature test chamber to verify that electronics will function at the edge of the atmosphere/outerspace. He needs this for the edge of space project he’s working on. A large cooler serves as the test chamber. It’s cooled down to about 0c -42C with dry ice, then a supply of liquid nitrogen is fed into a copper heat exchanging coil to bring the chamber down to -70C.