Today is the last day to get your Trinket Contest entries into us! After the break you’ll find another dozen that were sent in. If you’re waiting to see your own appear here please be patient as we’ve got a lot to wade through.
The contest asks you slap the Hackaday logo onto something for a chance at winning one of 20 Trinket dev boards donated by Adafruit for this contest.
Sheer luck brings a Halloween themed project for this Fail of the Week post. [Stryker] wrote in to the tips line to share a link to what is an extremely awesome hack. He carved four three different faces on the sides of his pumpkin, then sliced the eyes, nose, and mouth into different sections. Couple this with an internal skeleton made of wood and PVC and he’s got himself a nice hack which lets trick-or-treaters spin the sections to select one of up to 27 different faces.
The sections do spin rather well and the finished project looks fantastic. So what is it that failed? We’ll cover that after the break.
Continue reading “Fail Of The Week: 27 Face Jack-o’-Lantern”
It’s already pretty cool that [Clay] co-owns an Arcade, but he’s really impressed us with his custom-made Splatterhouse cabinet built to get his patrons in the Halloween spirit! A Namco brawler title from 1988, Splatterhouse came in an unadorned and otherwise forgettable cabinet. [Clay] salvaged an old Williams Defender, coating the sides with a cocktail of drywall compound, sand, and paint to achieve a stone texture. He then carved up some pink insulation foam into a tattered “wooden” frame and used it as a monitor bezel. For accents, he fashioned strips of latex to resemble torn flesh and placed them among the boards. The control panel is yet another work of art: [Clay] 3D printed a life-size human femur for the game’s joystick, and converted the buttons to look like eyeballs.
[Clay] decided to go beyond the stunning cosmetics, though, and tapped into the game’s CPU with a custom daughterboard that detects different in-game events and state changes such as player health. An ATMega165 uses four PWM outputs connected to a number of LEDs inside the cabinet and around the monitor bezel to react to the different events. If a player takes damage, red lights flash around the monitor. Inserting a coin or dying in the game causes a different set of LEDs behind the marquee to go nuts.
Check out his detailed project page for more information and see a video overview below. If building a full-scale arcade machine is out of your budget, you can always make a tiny one.
Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory wouldn’t be complete without some electrical sparks. So for [Rick’s] final Halloween DIY hack this year he gives us just that, but with a twist. This time it’s a double helix Jacob’s ladder. The sparks are flying as they twist and turn their way up this unique design, powered by a standard neon sign transformer. If you can get your hands on a 15,000 V 30 mA transformer, you might have just enough time to build one for Halloween.
The build is quite simple. Other than the transformer, you will need a few feet of ¼ inch flexible copper tubing and a piece of ¾ inch PVC pipe. After twisting the copper tubing around the PVC pipe to form the double helix, [Rick] mounts the tubing to a block of wood and removes the PVC form. In his video, which you can watch after the break, [Rick] demonstrates a standard Jacob’s ladder, as well as his double helix design. The double helix version has a much nicer and slower traveling arc even stopping at times.
You don’t want to set this up anyplace someone might touch it as it can be quite deadly or cause burns. [Rick] mentions not to use wood to mount your ladder because the wood will burn as it did during his testing. And do not operate unattended. Otherwise, it adds some spark to your great Halloween fun.
Continue reading “Spark-Up Your Halloween Party With This Double Helix Jacob’s Ladder”
Welcome to Stratum 0 in Braunschweig, Germany!
We had a bit of trouble finding this place — it’s around the side of a fairly large building that was once a piano factory. The main door was ajar, and it was pitch black inside. Do we enter? Do we call? We walked in a bit, and were met with more darkness. A bit too spooky for our tastes. Our wits got the better of us and we decided to call and make sure we had the right place and not the lair of some homicidal maniac… It turns out if you just ring the doorbell the lights come on. Whoops.
Up to the top floor we go!
Continue reading “Hackerspacing In Europe: Stratum 0 In Braunschweig”
Still looking for a good way to reflow solder at home? Look no further! [Don] has a very handy and inexpensive solution that looks great. It makes use of a cheap hot plate, a solid state relay, an IR temperature sensor, and an arduino.
[Don] started by modifying the hotplate by reversing the handle mount — this provides a useful location to mount the IR temperature sensor. The control circuit uses PWM to adjust the temperature of the hot plate using the solid state relay. Because the IR temperature sensor has a cone of visibility it ends up reading an average area temperature as opposed to an individual point — for reflow soldering this is perfect. [Don] notes that some calibration is required, as depending on the emissivity of the object being measured the readout can differ — shiney objects will read a lower temperature than dark objects. He recommends doing the calibration with a scrap PCB and your chosen solder paste to get a general baseline for your project.
Need more info on the actual reflow process? We posted a handy guide a few months ago.
[Yoshinok] recently posted an Instructable on doing a $10 smartphone-to-microscope conversion. The hack isn’t so much a conversion as just a handy jig, but it’s still interesting. The basic idea is to set up a platform for the slides, and to mount the smartphone directly above. The trick, and the reason this can be called a microscope, is that [Yoshinok] embeds the lens from a cheap laser pointer into the smartphone holder. He is able to get 40x optical magnification with the lens, and even though it sacrifices quality, he uses the built-in digital zoom to get up to 175x magnification.
By itself, you could use this with a light source to magnify 3D objects. [Yoshinok] demonstrates this with a dime. But since the slide holder is made of clear acrylic, he mounted a cheap LED flashlight in the base to serve as through-sample lighting. Using this setup, he was able to observe the process of plasmolysis.
If you have kids, this is certainly a project to do with them, but we can’t help but think it will be useful for non-parents alike. This sort of magnification is good enough for simple lab experiments, and given that most Hack-a-Day readers have these parts lying around, we figure the cost is closer to $0. If you give it a try, let us know your results in the comments!
Continue reading “Use Your Smartphone As A Microscope For Less Than $10”
