Hackaday Links: May 4, 2014

May 4, 2014 by 8 Comments

hackaday-links-chain

We’ve seen a few builds from the Flite Test guys before, like a literal flying toaster, airsoft guns mounted to planes, and giving an electric plane an afterburner (that actually produced a little extra thrust). Now the Flite Test crew is gearing up for the Flite Fest, an all things remote-controlled flight convention in Malvern, Ohio during the last weekend in July. Seems like a pretty cool way to spend spend a weekend.

Unless you get one of those fancy resistor kits where every value has its own compartment in a case or plastic baggie, you’ll soon rue the day your loose resistors become disorganized. [Kirll] has an interesting solution to hundreds of loose resistors: packaging tape. If you want a resistor, just grab a pair of scissors.

Okay, these Adafruit “totally not Muppets™” are awesome. The latest video in the Circuit Playground series is titled, “C is for Capacitor“. There’s also “B is for Battery“, because when life gives you lemons, light up an LED. Here’s the coloring book.

A few years ago, a couple of people at the LA Hackerspace Crashspace put together an animated flipbook device – something between a zoetrope and the numbers in those old electromechanical clocks – and launched a kickstarter. Now they’re putting on a show, presented by Giant Robot, featuring the animated art of dozens of artists.

Vintage electronics? Yes. Vintage Soviet electronics? Here’s 140 pages of pictures, mostly of old measurement devices.

 

Electronic Phenakistoscope!

January 1, 2014 by 9 Comments

phenakistoscope

Looking for a clever way to build a Phenakistoscope? Maybe you’re more familiar with its other names; Fantoscope, Phantasmascope, or perhaps its close cousin the Zoetrope?

If you’re still scratching your head, that’s okay — they have really weird names. What we’re referring to here is a type of optical illusion that mimics movement by showing a series of still images at an offset interval — this can be achieved by looking through slots, strobing a light (like in this case) or even by the use of mirrors.

This particular Phenakistoscope is a very simple but clever design that makes use of a recycled stepper motor from a printer, a CD as the animation disk, a strip of LED lighting, a few potentiometers and an Arduino to control the strobe. It works by synchronizing the strobe frequency with the motor rotation, resulting in the image in motion effect.

Stick around after the break for a full gallery of the build and a demonstration video.

Continue reading “Electronic Phenakistoscope!” →

Continental Europe’s First Maker Faire

October 20, 2012 by 21 Comments

Continental Europe’s first official sanctioned Maker Faire is well underway in the Netherlands, tucked away at the Open Lab Ebbinge in the city of Groningen.

Of course the Groningen Maker Faire will feature cool builds like the bike-mounted workshop built by [Bertoa] we’ve seen and a few wind-powered beach animals inspired by the work of [Theo Jansen]. Also on the schedule are a 3D printed zoetrope, delta robot pick and place, radio controlled submarines, and of course a fleet of electric go karts.

A few of the talks involve a mashup of Google Earth and 3D modeling from [Ronald van Aalst] [Dick Stadaand], and a very interesting talk on disability insurance for self-employed entrepreneurs from [Biba Shoemaker] and [Andre Jonkers].

[buZz] from the NURDspace hackerspace in Wageningen wrote in to tell us he’ll be participating in the Groningen Maker Faire’s Scrapheap Challenge, an awesome contest that pits teams against each other to build something in a setup very similar to the fondly remembered Junkyard Wars.

Of course, Hackaday’s writers and editors are about 3,000 miles away from continental Europe’s first Maker Faire, so we can’t provide any live updates. If you have any pictures or video, send them in and we’ll put them up.

Laser-etched LED Zeotrope Looks Like A Circular Monochrome Screen

October 3, 2012 by 12 Comments

The still image of this animated display really doesn’t do it justice. But you can get an idea of how this really does look like an old monochrome display. It’s actually a zeotrope made from LEDs and etched acrylic. The LEDs blink at a rate that synchronizes with the spinning acrylic to produce an animated image.

You probably already know that a zeotrope uses moving physical models to trick the eye into seeing an animation. In this case the models are etched into a piece of acrylic so that their outline glows when the material is edge-lit. Twelve pie piece shaped panes were designed in Inkscape to look like a scene from the Linux game World War IV. A stepper motor spins the ring which allows for the perfect synchronization seen in the clip after the break.

Continue reading “Laser-etched LED Zeotrope Looks Like A Circular Monochrome Screen” →

Weekly Roundup 1/14/12

January 14, 2012 by No comments

For those of you who haven’t been paying attention in class, here is the best of what has hit our blog this past week:

In the #1 spot is a post about a project where some pretty ambitious hackers found a way to run Linux on a digital picture frame. Bravo!

Next up is a post where [Chris] needs some help getting his 1/10th scale, cycle accurate Cray I ‘supercomputer’ to boot.

In third place is a post about a very elaborate 737 cockpit simulator that was built over the past couple of years. This is a pretty intense build with lots of details about how it was done.

Following that is a post about a 3D-printed device that is similar to a phenakistoscope but instead of using slits to allow you to see the models in succession, it blinks some LEDs at the appropriate times.

Finally rounding things out in fifth place is a post about Makerbot Industries’ most recent release, which will let you print out your own phenakistoscope. This 3D printer is bigger than their makerbot and optionally sports two extruders instead of one so that you can do dual colors or possibly dual materials.

Build Your Own Vertical Axis Wind Turbine

March 11, 2011 by 26 Comments

You can build a copy of this vertical wind turbine in a weekend and it won’t cost you all that much. Applied Sciences developed the hardware and they’re sharing all for the build details. You will be taken through every part of the build starting with the fin assembly which is made from stove-pipe material. This is a perfect raw material because it is already curved and suited for aerodynamic use in much the same way that PVC pipe is for making fins and we would expect it to be a bit lighter in weight. You will also need to turn your own coils when assembling the stator. This particular build process uses nine coils embedded in fiberglass. They remain stationary while two different discs, each containing a dozen rare earth magnets, rotate in close proximity to induce a current. It outputs three-phase AC current which can be turned to DC using a bridge rectifier and then further regulated for storage in batteries.

[Thanks Miguel]

555 Cartoons

February 22, 2011 by 10 Comments

Drehkino is a Turntable Cinema that plays short (50 frames) looping animations from specially printed, disks, and is housed in a wooden frame similar to a record player. The paper disks are the frames of animation and an optical rotary encoder pattern, that pattern is picked up by a infrared pair scavenged from an old mouse. The signal is then passed onto a 555 timer configured as a Schmitt trigger that (indirectly) drives the led strobe light creating animation that is synced to the speed of the turn table.

That sounds all good and well, but it must be a big pain to split up an animation and calculate each frame’s position etc, well that is covered too by a couple scripts. Movie clips are sent though virtualdub to select what 50 frames you want, then are exported to individual images, an sh script then takes over and gawk is used to manipulate the data and create an ImageMagick (“CONVSCRIPT”) file. After you do the script dance you are left with a perfectly spaced wheel with encoder ready to print on standard paper in a PDF format.

Software and schematics included, with future improvements already in the works and its nifty, so its worth a check. This is an interesting take on the old zoetrope design.