Heating, Bending, And Gluing To Make Acrylic Enclosures

February 7, 2013 by 17 Comments

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You can do a lot with acrylic and few tools. If you’re just starting out we’d suggest taking a look at [Michael Colombo’s] guide to heating, bending, and gluing to create custom acrylic enclosures. Chances are you already have most of what you need. The one tool you might be lacking is a heat gun.

The process starts with math. Before cutting the acrylic down to size you need to calculate how much you need. Next [Michael] demonstrates his cutting technique using a Dremel and a cut-off wheel. We prefer to clamp along the cut line, score many times with a razor knife, and snap the stuff. But you can also send it through a table saw if you have the right blade.

The bending technique he uses starts by clamping boards on either side of the bend. The acrylic left sticking out is pushed with a scrap board while the bend is heated with the heat gun. Once all of the corners were made in one piece the sides were glued in place. This last step can be tricky. The acrylic glue is made to work with perfect seams, so make sure your cuts are clean and the bent pieces line up.

The process was documented in the clip found after the jump. If you’re looking for a more targeted heat source check out this dedicated acrylic bender.

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Gifsockets: WebSockets Using Animated GIF Files

February 7, 2013 by 15 Comments

gifsockets

Using animated GIF images as a crude WebSocket is an idea we’ve never come across before, but it actually makes a lot of sense. Not in terms of it’s overall usefulness, but just for the fact that the animated files work in a similar way. The nature of these animated containers is what makes it work. A GIF doesn’t tell the browser how many frames to expect, so the connection is kept open until the “hey this is the last frame” command is received. This can be used to stream data to anything that can play the animations.

The demonstration after the break shows this in action. Hello World and a couple of other test messages are pushed to the browser without refreshing the page. In our mind that’s what’s useful — real time updates without a refresh or any underlying client-side code structure. But we haven’t looked into the particulars like does this eat bandwidth even when nothing new is being sent?

When [Hans] wrote into us about this gif hack he referenced this discussion panel on WebSockets. We didn’t watch the whole thing yet, but apparently someone calls the gif trick the WebSocket of the ’90s.

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Pocket Serial Host Acts As An Apple II Disk Drive

February 6, 2013 by 21 Comments

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[Osgeld] is showing off what he calls a sanity check. It’s the first non-breadboard version of his Pocket Serial Host. He’s been working on the project as a way to simplify getting programs onto the Apple II he has on his “retro bench”. When plugged in, the computer sees it as a disk drive.

The storage is provided by an SD card which is hidden on the underside of that protoboard. This makes it dead simple to hack away at your programs using a modern computer, then transfer them over to the retro hardware. The components used (starting at the far side of the board) are a DB9 serial connector next to a level converter to make it talk to the ATmega328 chip being pointed at with a tool. The chip below that is a level converter to get the microcontroller talking to the RTC chip seen to the right. The battery keeps that clock running when there’s no power from the 5V and 3.3V regulators mounted in the upper right.

The video after the break shows off this prototype, the breadboard circuit, and a demonstration with the Apple II.

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Fruit Piano Uses A Different Circuit Than The Makey Makey

February 6, 2013 by 10 Comments

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[Hasbi Sevinç] is using perishable goods in his electronics project. The orange, tomato, and two apples seen above act as keys for the virtual piano. The concept is the same as the Makey Makey which is often demonstrated as a banana piano. This implementation uses an Arduino to read the sensors and to connect to the computer running the piano program.

You can see there’s a fair amount of circuitry built on the breadboard. Each piece of fruit has its own channel to make it into a touch sensor. The signal produced when your finger contacts the food is amplified by transistors connected in a Darlington pair. That circuit drives the low side of a optoisolator transmitter. The receiving side of it is connected the I/O pin of the Arduino. You can see the schematic as well as a demo clip after the break.

This use of hardware frees up a lot of your microcontroller cycles. That’s because projects like this banana piano use the timers to measure RC decay. [Hasbi’s] setup provides a digital signal that at most only needs to be debounced.

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Wall Votive Display Controlled With A Glowing Cube

February 6, 2013 by 6 Comments

wall-votive-display

This wall hanging would look great even if it did no more than light up. But thanks to a unique controller it’s meant to work as an interactive display for your living area.

The rectangles and votive candle cups are a set of three store-bought hangings. But lighting the candles and remembering to blow them out was a pain, so [Adiel Fernandez] decided to add the LEDs to make the job easier. But why stop at that, in addition to an RGB light for each cup he made them fully addressable. It’s all the better for a light show, but this also opens up the arena for all manner of different uses.

Accompanying the wall installation is a palm-sized cube meant to sit on the coffee table. Whichever side of the cube us up sets the function for the display, with a rotation tweaking the function, and a fast spin used as a select. If the power icon is on the side facing up, a fast spin will turn the display on or off. There are also functions for weather, temperature, transportation (we were thinking something like a bus schedule notifier but it’s actually a bit different) and animation patterns. After the break you can watch a demo of the cube functionality.

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Brilliant Auto-off Feature For A Bike Light

February 6, 2013 by 30 Comments

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If you’re going to use your bicycle as transportation at night you really must have a head and tail light in hopes that the crazy drivers don’t hit you. For good reason, these lights don’t turn themselves off. But [Miceuz] kept forgetting to shut it down upon arrival and always ended up with dead batteries. His quest for an auto-off feature that actually worked ended in a brilliant and simple add-on circuit.

He first thought about using an accelerometer, but couldn’t find one that fit the bill without also adding a microcontroller. He came up with an even simpler circuit, which can be seen at the base of the black plastic housing. It’s a bit of copper clad board with a small spring attached. The spring completes an RC timer circuit which drives a MOSFET. When that circuit is charged, the MOSFET connects power to the bike light. When the cap runs out the MOSFET threshold cuts power and everything turns off. Since the spring jiggles while he rides it provides the momentary connection necessary to charge the capacitor. Stay stationary for about 30 seconds and the auto-off kicks in.

Making Karaoke Worse

February 6, 2013 by 19 Comments

kaoss belt

Karaoke just isn’t fair. Not only do you have people who can’t sing choosing to belt out extremely difficult to sing songs, but the variety of songs generally isn’t that great. In an effort to make the karaoke situation at the pubs he frequents better – or worse, depending on how you look at it – [cosmic blooper] is now bringing a vocal effects processor to karaoke. Yes, now he’s got pitch shifting that takes him into [Bieber] territory, and auto tune to emulate the [T-Pain] and the Black Eyed Peas.

To bring the world of synths and effects to a karaoke party, [cosmic blooper] took a battery-powered Kaoss Pad and attached it to his belt with the help of some sheet metal. An RCA to XLR adapter connects the Kaoss Pad to the karaoke microphone, while a mic of questionable quality takes [blooper]’s voice to be transmuted into a horrifying display of effects and pitch shifters.

There’s no video of [cosmic blooper]’s karaoke machine in action, but he tells us he’ll be getting one up soon.