RGB “Tilty Cube”

February 10, 2011 by 20 Comments

[Ben’s] introduction to microcontrollers was this fun little gift he calls the “tilty cube”. It is an acrylic box with 3 LEDs mounted inside that changes color based off of how you tilt it. Sounds like a fun toy, and a good project to learn with. [Ben] chose the PIC12F615 as the brains and laid it all out on a perfboard.  Since this was his first microcontroller experience he had to learn how to blink the LEDs, then figure out PWM etc. Though there is no video of the project in its finished state, since it was given away as a gift, we assume he figured it out pretty well.  He does state that the LEDs are dimmer than he had hoped and offers some thoughts on how he would do the entire project better next time.

512 LED Cube

January 2, 2011 by 72 Comments

Get out the soldering iron and clear your schedule, it’s going to take you a while to assemble this 8x8x8 LED matrix which contains a total of 512 LEDs. We’ve looked in on a 3x3x3 cube, and [Chr], who is responsible for this one, has assembled a 4x4x4 cube before, but this one is quite a leap in complexity. It isn’t just physical assembly problems that increase with scale, you’ll need to consider a power supply too since one layer of a 3x3x3 cube would need at 90 mA, but a single layer of the cube above requires 640 mA to light all of the diodes. Multiplexing is handled per-layer, controlled by  ICs which share 8 data lines and are latched by a shift register. This means the display only requires 11 microcontroller pins for addressing. It is striking how well [Chr] explains the design process, and how cleanly he builds the driver circuits on protoboard. There’s a lot to look at and a lot to learn, not to mention the stunning results which can be seen in the video after the break.

Continue reading “512 LED Cube” →

Girltech. Sugar Cubes. Monocrome LCD

November 15, 2010 by 13 Comments

We’ve seen these little toys called “sugar cubes” by GirlTech around for a while now. They are a toy block, with an LCD on the front and they respond to movement, button presses and they interact with each other if you stack them up. We’re just as curious as anyone else about their internals, but maybe not quite curious enough to rush out and buy one. Luckily, we don’t have to as [Joby] has done it for us and documented what he found. While it may be lacking in extreme detail, at least our curiosity is somewhat satiated.
We can see that it has a 16×16 LCD, an unknown chip hidden under an epoxy blob as usual. To determine what character is shown, you can bridge one of 4 spots on the PCB, though he has only managed to switch to a little ninja and a question mark. Does anyone have any brilliant ideas on a project for these?

One-handed GameCube Controller

August 12, 2010 by 10 Comments

[Hasse] built a one-handed video game controller for his brother. He fit everything he needed into the body of an existing controller and came up with a very usable system. The controller will be right-hand only, so the left shoulder button was moved underneath the right side where your middle finger can get at it. This leaves the d-pad and the left analog stick to account for. By combining an ATtiny44A, an accelerometer, and a digital to analog converter the controller can sense motion. The microcontroller reads in the accelerometer data, gives user feedback via four added LEDs on the d-pad, and the DAC feeds the appropriate signals back into the controller as if you were using the stick. There is even a switch to select whether the motion data is mapped to the analog stick or to the d-pad. We’ve included a demo video after the break.

Find that you also need some one-armed typing assistance? Check out this half-qwerty keyboard hack. Continue reading “One-handed GameCube Controller” →

CubeStormer; Quick Solutions From LEGO Parts

July 10, 2010 by 20 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaRcWB3jwMo]

CubeStormer solves Rubik’s cubes and it does it quickly! Made entirely out of LEGO, a Mindstorm web camera is used to scan in the cube with four mechanical hands for manipulation. The device is capable of solving a random cube in less than 11 seconds. That’s quite a bit faster than the last Minstorm solver we saw, and the CuBear solver we are so fond of.

[Thanks Ferdinand]

Balancing Cube Looks More Like A Star

May 19, 2010 by 23 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbT_XoSIlEo]

This art-meets-robot has the grueling task of standing on one foot all day long while other robots get to bend to their heart’s content. It balances on that single point by adjusting its center of gravity with six pendulum-like appendages. To make the system more like the Borg, each of those six modules shares sensor data with the rest and work together to keep the unit upright. Give in to loving the design because resistance is futile.

[Via BotJunkie]

ZeroPlus Logic Cube Modification

March 30, 2010 by 128 Comments

the folks over at OpenSchemes are at it again. This time they’ve cracked open a low end ZerPlus logic analyzer and modified it to function the same as the higher end model. The 16 channel version they purchased appeared to be fully capable of handling the 32 channels of the more expensive model. The installation of the additional components looks like it might be somewhat difficult, but it is certainly cheap.We love seeing things upgraded for cheap. You might recognize OpenSchemes from when they upgraded the DMM tweezers or hacked the USB serial adapters.

[via HackedGadgets]