Make Your Own LED Lightbulb!

November 3, 2013 by 43 Comments

LED lightbulb

Do you like saving electricity? Who doesn’t!

Do you have a lot of LED light strips lying around, destined for a project that you never quite got around to? We’re guilty!

Do you have an old DC power adapter? Of course you do.

Do you love soldering? Duh.

Do you have a dead fluorescent light bulb sitting around? Maybe…

If so, here’s a quick and silly guide to making your very own LED light bulb! The result is a bit ghetto we admit, but quite functional. Perhaps it could be improved by adding a glass Christmas bobble to make it look a bit more like a regular light bulb. And if you’re ambitious enough you could throw a microprocessor in there and add wireless control to it as well … but let’s be honest, smart LED light bulbs are getting quite affordable these days. But hey, you’ve got to do something for entertainment!

Assassin’s Creed Hidden Blade

November 2, 2013 by 38 Comments

The youngins in the crowd may not remember Taxi Driver, but [Matt]’s fully functional hidden blade from Assassin’s Creed finally does justice to the hidden weapon on a drawer slide idea. It’s got everything you would want – immaculate craftsmanship and a video game reference for that every so necessary blog cred.

[Matt] started his hidden blade build with a drawer slide, mounting an old WWII replica blade to the slider. The blade retraction is spring-loaded, and with a small ring and a bit of wire, the blade gets its automatic draw and retraction.

The arm brace is where this project really shines. [Matt] crafted this out of two pieces of leather, tooled with the Assassin’s insignia and dyed to a deep, jet black

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen an automatic hidden blade from Assassin’s Creed, but [Matt]’s effort is really top-notch. He’s got beautiful leather crafting down pat, and we can only hope his Halloween was filled with parkour and stabbing.

Video Game Automation Hacks

November 2, 2013 by 7 Comments

coupleofvideogamehacks

3rd party console game controllers sometimes sport a “rapid-fire” button to give gamers an unfair advantage. [Connor’s] project is along the same lines, but his hack had a different goal: automate the input of GTA5 cheat codes. [Connor] admits that this is his first Arduino hack, but aside from a small hiccup, he managed to pull it off. The build connects each button on a PS3 controller via some ribbon cable to its own digital out on an Arduino Uno . After plugging in some pretty straightforward code, [Connor] can simply press one button to automate a lengthy cheat code process.

[Matt’s] hack manages to save him even more user input in this second video game hack, which automates finger clicks in an Android game. [Matt] pieced together a couple of servos plugged into a PICAXE-18M2 microcontroller, which repeats one simple action in [Matt’s] Sims Freeplay game: continuously “freshening” (flushing?) a toilet. To mimic the same capacitive response of two fingers, [Matt] built the two contact surfaces out of some anti-static foam, then grounded them out with a wire to the ground on the board.

Check out a gallery of [Connor’s] controller and a video of [Matt’s] tablet hack after the break, then check out a rapid fire controller hack that attacks an XBox360 controller.

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Supercap-Based Cell Phone Charger

November 2, 2013 by 56 Comments

Screen Shot 2013-11-02 at 11.21.58 AM[Barry] sent us a tip about a video from [electronupdate], describing an experimental cell phone charger. It’s a familiar issue: Your cell phone battery is low, and you aren’t in a position to plug it in for hours to charge. Some phones, including the one in his video, have swappable batteries, but that isn’t always an option either. As he explains in the video, a wall outlet can deliver the joule capacity of a high-end battery in a matter of seconds, but it is impossible to charge a battery that quickly. Capacitors, on the other hand, charge near-instantly.

[electronupdate] decided to look at the possibility of using super capacitors to power a typical usb plug. It would allow you to charge a secondary power supply in a short period of time, and then get on your way, letting your phone charge slowly from the device.

His experiment wasn’t entirely successful, possibly because he used 2.7V capacitors, which required a boost regulator and limited the useful voltage range. We think he might have had better success using 120V capacitors and a switching power supply, but it would be nice to see the various options compared.

Oh, [electronupdate] describes using this circuit as you are rushing to your airplane. We aren’t convinced carrying a couple super capacitors through a TSA checkpoint would be the best idea… YMMV.

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Raspberry Pi Becomes A Universal Translator

November 2, 2013 by 59 Comments

hola-me-nombre-david-conroy

We’re still about 150 years away from the invention of the universal translator by [Lt Cdr Sato] of the Enterprise NX-01, but [Dave] has something that’s almost as good: a speech recognition, translation, and text to speech setup for the Raspberry Pi that theoretically allows anyone to speak in sixty different languages.

After setting up all the Linux audio cruft, [Dave] digs in and starts on converting the guttural vocalizations of a meat speaker into something Google’s speech to text service can understand. From there, it’s off to Google again, this time converting text in one language into the writings of another.

[Dave]’s end result is a shell script that works reasonably well for something that won’t be invented for another 150 years. The video below shows the script successfully translating English to spanish, but it should work equally well with other languages such as dutch and latin, as well as less popular language such as esperanto and french.

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Adorable Homebrew Waveform Generator

November 2, 2013 by 25 Comments

waveform

For want of new test equipment, or simply a project, [Enzo] decided he would take a shot at creating his own waveform generator*. Not only is it a great project, it’s also a decent piece of test equipment, with proper signal conditioning, a nice front panel, and a built-in wall transformer.

The guts of [Enzo]’s waveform generator is an AD9833 programmable waveform generator, a neat little chip that can output square and triangle waves fro 0.1 Hz to 3.2 MHz and sine waves from 0.1 Hz to 1.6 MHz. [Enzo] is controlling this chip with a PIC16 microcontroller, with a whole bunch of analog circuitry between the digital domain and the BNC connector on the front panel.

The waveform generator is controlled by a suite of dials and switches on the front panel, giving [Enzo] complete control over his new tool.

* Here’s a Google translation, but good luck with that. Just… get Chrome or something.