North Street Labs Try To Spice Up A Game Of Tic-Tac-Toe

May 18, 2013 by 4 Comments

tic-tac-toe-stomp-box

The team at North Street Labs really went all out with this Tic-Tack-Toe stomp box. At its most basic it’s a blinky version of the simple two-player game. But there’s always some added appeal when you make large manifestations of normally small items; the 10x Arduino is a good example of this.

The project is NSL’s qualifying entry for this year’s Red Bull Creation Contest (has it already been a year since the last contest?). A special Arduino shield was produced once again, this time it features hardware necessary to control LED strips… a lot of them. That led to the creation of this box, which houses a ton of strip sections inside to light the grid based on tapping one of the red buttons with your foot. We’d image the game would be seldom used at your hackerspace, but they take it to show off at the local children’s museum and it’s a huge hit with the kids!

NSL Takes Their Propeller Driven Car To The Drive Through

February 27, 2013 by 103 Comments

nsl-propeller-driven-land-vehicle

So what’s the first thing you do after completing your propeller driven land tricycle build? Head on over to the Starbucks drive through and see what kind of response you get from the workers. That’s exactly what the guys from North Street Labs did. You can see the response in the clip after the jump.

Having three wheels and being moved by an electric motor with a propeller led to the name TriFly. The build is their entry in The Deconstruction, a build contest which includes other entries like the Beer pouring machine we featured on Monday. Aside from the fun with the final project, NSL’s well-produced video includes a quick trip through the fabrication process. They did a great job making the machine about 40% street legal and it’s obvious they had a blast while doing so.

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Rewiring A Free Carnival Sign

October 23, 2012 by 13 Comments

Late last September, Hackaday along with other hackerspaces including North Street Labs, 1.21 Jigawatts, Maker Twins, made their way to the NYC Maker Faire via the Red Bull Creation contest. The objectives of the contest were simple: build a game in 72 hours, have people vote on it, and join the Red Bull crew in Queens for a carnival-like atmosphere.

When the Maker Faire was over, Red Bull had some leftover props from their Midway at Maker Faire setup, including a few illuminated carnival signs. Without any use for them, they graciously gave Hackaday, North Street, Maker Twins and the Jigawatts the signs to their respective rides.

Now that things have settled down and the rides have returned to their home base, the folks over at North Street decided to improve their sign. At Maker Fair, these signs were illuminated by 50 incandescent bulbs, all wired on the same circuit. [Steve] over at North Street had the awesome idea of adding a persistence of vision aspect to the sign, so work began on wiring every fourth bulb in series.

To drive the light circuits, North Street repurposed the Arduino Relay shield originally used for the lights on the Centrifury, their competitive centrifuge and spinning hell of a game. In the video after the break, you can see the addition of POV lights really brings out the carnival atmosphere. A literally brilliant build, and a wonderful addition to the scariest game ever made.

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NES Light Gun Gets A Burning Laser Upgrade

September 21, 2012 by 34 Comments

The Nintendo Light Gun makes a perfect burning laser. Of course it’s been gutted to make this happen. Nonetheless, the retro look can’t be beat, and the gun form factor is just what you need in a laser weapon.

This will literally burn your eye out of your head, so [Justin] and his buddies over a North Street Labs are all wearing protective goggles designed for this laser’s wavelength. But they also built a safety into the zapper itself. At the beginning of the video clip (embedded after the break) you will see there’s a key lock mounted in the butt. This lock completes the circuit between the battery and driver board. The 2W output is achieved by a 445nm M140 diode. A lot went into the heat sink and mounting cylinder to make sure the diode doesn’t just burn up after a few seconds of use.

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Back Up The Band With Some RGB Stage Lights

August 14, 2012 by 4 Comments

Fresh off the 72-hour madness of the Red Bull Creation contest some of the folks a North Street Labs took on a stage lighting project. It’s for a local performing venue that just opened up, and despite the time crunch the team pulled off another great build.

Sixteen meters of LED strip make the electronics for the project a whole lot easier. The strips run up the center of a cabinets built as stand-alone columns which will end up at the back of the stage. Each cabinet has its own 5V 4A power supply (note the burnout issues they mention when using cheap eBay PSUs). Each column has its own Arduino Uno driving the LEDs, with an RS485 shield to connect back to a main Arduino Mega 2560 controller. It uses a PSX controller to switch between different lighting modes.

The seven towers boasting 688 LEDs isn’t all that’s shedding light on the show. There’s also about 300 feet of EL wire at work.

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Spinning-hell Of A Game

July 25, 2012 by 26 Comments

North Street Labs really brought their ‘A’ game to the build finals for the Red Bull Creation contest. Behold the Centrifury, their spinning hell of a game. You can’t really make it out (because of the spinning) but the game consists of two bucket seats positioned opposite of each other on a merry-go-round type deck. Each player has a button in front of them which must be held down for the rig to start spinning. When you can’t take it any more just release the button and the spinning will stop. But you’ll also have lost the game. Whomever can hold out longer wins.

It’s not surprising to see such a well-polished build. After all, this is the same group that built the violently vibrating game of Simon. This time around most of the work came in the form of engineering and welding. First they had to make sure the design could take the forces this things puts out, then they had to build it. And all within the 72-hour time limit. We’re not sure what’s harder, winning the game or trying not to smile while watching the video after the break.

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The Live Streaming 72 Hour Build-off Begins Tonight!

July 19, 2012 by 2 Comments

Tonight at 6pm pst, the people at RedBull will be announcing the theme for the 72 hour build-off. We’ve cleaned our space, set up the cameras, and tried to get a good night’s sleep.  We’re all ready to kick some ass and would love it if you would join in to watch and even chat with us during the build. You should be able to watch all of the teams at the red bull contest web site. Though you can also just tune in to us at the link below, or on the sidebar.

During some of our team meetings we decided that watching a live stream of us hunched over some device for 72 hours would be extremely boring. To help remedy this, we have been contacting people all week to arrange proper amusement. We have graffiti artists, dancers, and some other miscellaneous things(possibly fire breathers?) in the works to help break the monotony. You’ll see a board labelled “EVENTS” in the bottom left of our stream. This should help keep you notified when the next bit of amusement shall arrive.

If you want to just watch the teams individually, there’s a list of each of our channels after the break.

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