Building A Small Keypad For Strategy Games

September 10, 2013 by 18 Comments

A month ago [Andreas] started playing Starcraft 2 again. As he was not comfortable with the default hotkeys on a normal keyboard, [Andreas] decided to build his own.

He started by salvaging keys from an old keyboard he had lying around, then 3D printed the case you see in the picture above to fit them. The keyboard electrical design is a simple matrix and it appears that he etched the PCB himself. To provide the required USB connectivity, the Atmega8U2 was chosen. It comes with a pre-programmed USB bootloader that [Andreas] chose to activate when the left key is pressed at the system startup. The HID class was implemented using the LUFA-USB Framework and the final product is definitely good looking.

All the files required to duplicate his design can be found here. You can also checkout another starcraft keyboard and an ergonomic keyboard that we previously featured.

ArduGuitar, An Arduino Controllable Guitar

September 10, 2013 by 18 Comments

The ArduGuitar

Electric guitars have several switches and potentiometers for controlling volume, tone, and which pickups are enabled. Rather than fiddling with these by hand, [Bob] built the ArduGuitar. It uses an Arduino to control the parameters over Bluetooth. This allows for musicians to configure presets, then recall them as needed, providing the exact same sound every time. It’s similar to the Guitarduino, but adds wireless control.

The internals of the ArduGuitar consist of the Arduino Micro, a BlueSMiRF from Sparkfun, and resistive opto-isolators. The resistive opto-isolators allow the Arduino to adjust resistance through an electrically isolated barrier. This prevents the Arduino from interfering with the guitar’s sound.

Some of the first Vactrols were used to create a tremolo effect in guitar amplifiers. These pulsed a incandescent lamp onto a photoresistor. Fortunately, there are now integrated solutions. PerkinElmer makes these, and they have a nice application note [PDF] on audio applications.

The final part of the design is an Android app, which provides remote control over Bluetooth. The source for everything is available on Github, and the detailed build log is available here.

An Improved Bubble Display With RGB LEDs

September 10, 2013 by 14 Comments

Making a bubble display is quite an undertaking, but [Jay] takes advantage of iterative design to construct this impressive (and at 60 tubes, massive) bubble display. The display functions by dispensing bubbles to serve as illuminated pixels in each tube as they rise through the fluid. His build log steps through the display’s construction with a keen attention to detail and above all, patience.

Rather than diving right in and slapping some tubes together, [Jay] took the time to research other bubble display projects, including one we featured a few years back that grew out of yet another HackaDay article. His prototypes started off small to test potential features: whether to use water or glycerin, timing for the air pumps and bubble size, and several others. [Jay] even filled the log with videos of every test, so you can watch the problems and solutions unfold at each step.

The finished display boasts sixty 30″ tall tubes, making it 64″ wide. [Jay] also installed RGB LEDs at every edge where the tubes meet to better distribute the light. You can watch one of the many videos of the display at work below.

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E-cigarettes, Powered By An NES Controller

September 10, 2013 by 59 Comments

Electronic cigarettes are all the rage these days, and as with any new electronic bauble, someone is eventually going to stuff it in some old NES hardware. The NES controller e-cig has been done before, but [mastblast09]’s controller mod is one of the best ones around.

A bit of background before we dig into this: e-cigarettes are just any other *cough cough cough* vaporizer you might find, but instead of turning a solid into a vapor, these guys turn a nicotine-infused liquid into a vapor. As e-cigarettes are a bit more legal than some other magic boxes, there is, of course, an amazing amount of options out there for those that partake.

[Mastblast09] is using an off-the-shelf e-cig controller and charger board carefully placed them in a hollowed out NES controller. With the help of a few tact switches he made the B button on the controller light up the coil and the up and down switches change the wattage.

The real treat in this build is the addition of a very small LED voltmeter. With this, [mastblast09] can check out the voltage of his NES e-cigarette under load, a big help if you’re trying to perfect the perfect vape while the battery is under load.

Graffiti Briefcase For Stealth Tagging

September 9, 2013 by 251 Comments

We’re floored by painter and engineer [Bob Partington’s] graffiti briefcase, which proves how well art and tech can complement one another. Fear not, Arduino haters, [Bob]’s case is an analog dream: no microcontrollers here.

The guts consist of 2 components: a linear drive system and a trigger assembly. The former takes advantage of a small RC motor with a chain drive which slides the can’s mounting unit along two stainless steel rods. The latter includes a custom wound solenoid plugged into a 24V cordless drill battery, which slams down 5 pounds of force onto the can’s nozzle to fire the paint.

This all fits into an otherwise inconspicuous looking briefcase to provide some urban camouflage. The final component is a stencil, which slides into a rectangular hole on the bottom of the case. The paint can sprays downward through the stencil and tags the ground at the touch of a brass button located near the handle.  [Bob] has plenty of other cool inventions you should check out that are less illegal. Or, stick it to the man by automating your tagging with Time Writer.

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How FindChips Started As A NASA Engineer’s Hack

September 9, 2013 by 58 Comments

A couple of weeks ago I was visiting SupplyFrame to meet the new owners of Hackaday. The CEO, [Steve Flagg] asked me how we can introduce FindChips to the readers. I’m used to people trying to get things on our front page so I had the question ready for him: where’s the hack? Much to my surprise he was ready for me. “What if I tell you that it started as a hack by a NASA Engineer?”

It turns out he was right. He put me in contact with [Randy Sargent], the founder of FindChips.com. If you’ve ever hacked together a script to make your life easier you’ll want to listen to what Randy had to say. You never know when it’ll turn into a full-blown start-up.

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Stripping Kindle DRM With Lego

September 9, 2013 by 75 Comments

DRM

Consider a book sitting on a shelf. You can lend it out to a friend, you don’t need a special device to read it, and if you are so inclined, you can photocopy it. This isn’t true with Kindle eBooks that place severe restrictions on what you can do with a book via DRM. Although it is possible to strip eBook DRM with a few programs on your computer, [Peter] came up with a fool-proof way that’s an amateur engineering marvel. He’s turning Kindle eBooks into plain text using Lego.

[Peter] is using a few bits of a Lego NTX system to press the, ‘next page’ button on his Kindle, then smash the space bar on his Mac to take a picture. These pictures are then sent to a cloud-based text recognition service. After a few hours of listening to plastic gears grinding, [Peter] has a copy of his eBook in plain text format sitting in his computer.

As impractical as it looks, using a robot, camera, and OCR is actually a really, really good way to turn eBooks plagued with DRM into a text file. Even if Amazon updates their DRM to make the current software cracking methods break, [Peter] will always have his Lego robot ready to scan a few hundred pages of text at a time.

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