DIY Breathalyzer May Be The Hit Of The Party

December 16, 2010 by 25 Comments

Okay, this may not be saving any lives, but it makes for a fun novelty at your next rager. Most Breathalyzers aim to keep you from driving when you’ve had too many. The Squidalyzer encourages party-goers to drink more and more by treating a high blood-alcohol-content with great fanfare. An Arduino, a gas sensor, and Processing all come together for this hack. A television interface tells you when to blow into a cup which houses the sensor, and gives a reading of what it measures. Blow higher than the last guy and you’ll break the record. Watch the demo after the break to see the fun [Geoff] had with it. And remember, friends don’t let friends solder drunk.

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Audio Controlled Party Lights

November 28, 2010 by 15 Comments

[Thibault Brevet] wanted his own party lighting that pulsed and faded along with the tunes. He ended up building a system based on an Arduino and a PC running Processing. The output from a mixing board is fed into a PC and measured by the Processing script. From there, the calculated light levels are sent to the Arduino to address the LEDs via the control board seen above. [Thibault] built four LED modules that each have two 4-channel LEDs (red, green, blue, white) separated by a few feet. This means 32 PWM signals are necessary to drive the system. To get there, he utilized a pair of TLC5940 16-channel PWM chips, which function like cascading shift registers but have some fantastic current limiting and dot correction features. Take a look at the demo after the break to see what he’s accomplished.

The TLC5940 is a popular choice for driving RGB LEDs, and would be a nice part to use if you decide to make yourself a Ping Pong LED Wall.

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Build A Confetti Cannon For Your Next Party

November 8, 2010 by 11 Comments

[Scott] built a confetti canon to spice up the party. It’s pneumatic and re-purposes a fire extinguisher as the air tank. He had a refillable extinguisher that used water instead of chemical retardant. After emptying the water and ensuring all of the pressure had been release he swapped the hose and nozzle for a sprinkler solenoid valve. Securing the extinguisher’s actuator lever with a pipe clamp holds the internal valve open, leaving the solenoid to control the pressure release. This way the canon can be fired electronically, or manually.

This type of solenoid valve is a popular choice with pneumatic canons. We suppose you could even adapt this for use as a T-shirt cannon.

[Thanks BoBeR182]

2010 Ninja Party Badge

July 30, 2010 by 19 Comments

Wired took a look at this year’s Ninja Party badges. We were giddy about all the goodies involved in last year’s must-have badge that served as an invitation to the party. It was tailor-made for hacking, including an on-board disassembler. This year’s details are still a bit sparse but the offering is more along the lines of a market-ready product. The badges come in hand held gaming format, with a d-pad and two buttons. They can connect wirelessly with each other and with hidden base stations, allowing participants to fight in the digital realm for LED-indicated achievements. The teaser is tantalizing and we can’t wait to hear details about the real/digital gaming adventure soon to unfold.

New Year’s Party Favor?

December 28, 2009 by 17 Comments

[Infernoz] built a POV display to help ring in the new year. There is a low component count; an ATtiny26, DIP switch, power switch, CR2032 battery and holder, pin header, 8 LEDs, and a pull-up resistor. The board is single sided without any jumpers that we can see. He’s moving the display by swinging it on a rope but the PCB is the perfect shape to attach to a fan. We love these blinky displays and if you’ve got some parts this makes a great party favor for New Year’s Eve. Check out the video after the break.

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Ninja Networks Party Badge

August 10, 2009 by 24 Comments

ninjabadge

UPDATE: The director’s cut of the story

While coverage of the official Defcon badge has been pretty heavy, there was a badge that was far more exclusive and talked about way more. For the last ten years at Defcon a group of hackers known as Ninja Networks hosted an invitation-only party for selected attendees. For the 2009 event, [cstone] and [w0z] created an electronic badge which acted as the ticket to the party. The badge is based around an 8-bit Freescale microcontroller (MC9S08QE8) which drives 10 individual 16-segment HIOX-format LED displays. Continue reading “Ninja Networks Party Badge” →

Colorize Your Election Party

November 3, 2008 by 19 Comments

blue_red
[Eric] has put together a simple python script to scrape election results from CNN.com. It uses urllib2 to return the popular and electoral votes for each party and throws an ElectionWon exception when CNN calls the race. He’s planning on hooking this to DMX controlled RGB LED lighting that will shift to either blue or red as the night progresses. It’s a great starting point if you want to pull off something similar.

You may remember [Eric] for building the IKEA MAME table and the TRS-80 wireless terminal.

[photo: skenmy]

UPDATE: [Garrett] of macetech is putting the finishing touches on his version which uses 32 ShiftBrite modules and 2 4-digit displays controlled by a CuBLOC.