Solving A Rubick’s Cube With LEGO And Popsicle Sticks

December 15, 2012 by 20 Comments

solver

We’ve seen automated Rubick’s Cube solvers before, but never one that has garnered as many awards as [James]’ popsicle stick and LEGO Rubick’s Cube solver.\

To keep the project complexity down, [James] opted not to use a webcam to detect the color pattern on each face of the cube. Instead, he wrote a little Python app to manually enter the pattern on each face before letting his algorithm loose on the cube and calculating how to solve it.

So far, [James] has seen a huge amount of success from his project. He entered it in the New Zealand Brightsparks competition netting him $1000. This competition led to a win in the Realize the Dream science competition where he won a major prize and an entry into the International Taiwan Science Fair held early next year. An awesome accomplishment from a budding hacker, and we can’t wait to see what he comes up with next.

You can check out a video of [James]’ cube solver after the break.

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Adventures In Mold Making And Making Your Own Enclosures

December 15, 2012 by 16 Comments

case

The folks at SC-3000 survivors have been working on a cartridge capable of storing dozens of games for the ancient Sega SC-3000 computer. The PCB works beautifully, but making a case for their cartridge left them with few options. They could use a 3D printer or simply collect a whole bunch of used cartridge cases, but making their own mold for a cartridge case was the best solution.

To create the mold for their multicart enclosure, the SC-3000 survivors first took an old, used case and made a silicone mold. While the first attempt at mold making was encouraging, several problems began to crop up due to the lack of vent holes and wiggling the mold before the resin had set. Before long, a proper technique to make resin casts was developed: use lots of resin, and don’t apply pressure or rubber bands to a curing mold.

We’re always impressed by what can be done with a few sheets of plastic, some Bondo, and the inordinate amounts of patience and sandpaper we see with other case mods and enclosure builds. the SC-3000 survivors put together an enclosure that rivals any Bondo build, and we’re happy they put out this tutorial.

A Thermal Imaging Camera For Your Phone

December 15, 2012 by 23 Comments

When last we heard of a cheap thermal imaging camera accessory for any smart phone, we were blown away at how easily a very expensive electronic device could be replicated with an Arduino and enough know how. Now, that thermal imaging camera is a kickstarter project and provides a cheap way to put a thermal imaging camera in the tool chest of makers the world over.

It’s called the IR-Blue, and simply by connecting your phone to the IR-Blue with Bluetooth, you can overlay the output of a thermal imaging camera on the output of your camera’s phone.

The thermal imaging sensor is basically a low-resolution camera (16 x 4 pixels) for infrared radiation. This sensor is factory calibrated to detect heat in a range between -20 and 300 ˚C. This range allows anyone to easily see where drafts in a house are coming from, where heat in a computer is being generated, or figuring out how to cook a steak.

It’s an awesome and well designed product, so we’ve got to hand it to [Andy] and the IR-Blue team for putting very expensive tools in everyone’s hands.

Leveraging The GPU To Accelerate The Linux Kernel

December 14, 2012 by 58 Comments

Powerful graphics cards are pretty affordable these days. Even though we rarely do high-end gaming on our daily machine we still have a GeForce 9800 GT. That goes to waste on a machine used mainly to publish posts and write code for microcontrollers. But perhaps we can put the GPU to good use when it comes compile time. The KGPU package enlists your graphics card to help the kernel do some heavy lifting.

This won’t work for just any GPU. The technique uses CUDA, which is a parallel computing package for NVIDIA hardware. But don’t let lack of hardware keep you from checking it out. [Weibin Sun] is one of the researchers behind the technique. He posted a whitepaper (PDF) on the topic over at his website.

Add this to the growing list of non-graphic applications for today graphics hardware.

UPDATE: Looks like we won’t be trying this out after all. Your GPU must support CUDA 2.0 or higher. We found ours on this list and it’s only capable of CUDA 1.0.

[Thanks John]

Self-balancing Unicycle Using Arduino And Sparkfun IMU

December 14, 2012 by 21 Comments

Raptor-Bike-self-balancing-unicycle

Here’s proof that you can build cool stuff with simple tools. This self-balancing unicycle uses an Arduino and a five degree of freedom IMU from Sparkfun to keep the rider upright. Well, it’ll keep you upright as long as you have good side-to-side balance. But that’s true of any unicycle, right?

The Raptor was built by [Nick Thatcker] who is no stranger to self-balancing transportation. A few years back he built a Segway clone and the same type of geared motor used in that project also went into this one. I connects to the wheel with a chain, allowing him to keep the motor hidden in the saddle. He gets between 90 and 120 minutes of used on one charge with a top speed of 10 MPH. The motor could move you along faster but he has limited this in firmware to ensure it has enough power to ‘catch up’ if you lean too far forward.

Don’t miss the demo after the break. If you like this unicycle there are several others worth looking at.

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Raspberry Pi Used To Automate A Dimmable Light Bulb

December 14, 2012 by 8 Comments

raspberry-pi-controlled-dimmer

[Stephen] took the safe route when getting his Raspberry Pi to dim an AC light bulb. He didn’t roll his own outlet box with a mains-rated relay inside, going with a mechanical connection instead of electrical. By attaching a servo motor to the dimmer knob the RPi can adjust the light level without risk of electric shock.

He is using the ServoBlaster package to drive the servo motor with the Raspberry Pi GPIO pins. That’s all fine and good by itself, but he went the extra mile and designed a few different levels of functionality around the pairing. The motivation behind the hack was to build a sunrise clock that had a lot of power when it comes to luminosity. But he also plied the RPi’s networking features to serve up a web-based control. It has a slider to set the light level, as well as breath (like a slow fade) and flash features.

The servo is a bit noisy when moving quickly, but the sunrise alarm takes 30 minutes so the gears don’t really make any noise at all. Check it out in the clip after the break.

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Webmote: Control Anything With Web-based Remote

December 14, 2012 by 8 Comments

control-anything-from-the-web

We’ve seen a lot of projects that let you control all of your devices from a smartphone. But this universal web-based remote control system looks like the most versatile we’ve seen yet. The project is called Webmote as the controls are served up as a web interface so that you’re not limited to say an Android device. The UI can be customized by choosing what buttons you will use and where to place them on the display. You can get a good feel for this by viewing this G+ album. Setup is made a bit easier thanks to an add-on system that has predefined layouts for common things like controlling XBMC.

The hardware seen above is the business end of Webmote. It’s an Arduino with an IR receiver, IR LED, and an XBee module. For your common home entertainment devices you can teach the system your codes using the IR receiver. The IR LED is used to transmit those codes back, and the Xbee gives you the ability to control X10 (home automation) devices. Right now the setup requires the hardware be connected to a server via USB, but it shouldn’t be hard to set up some type of wireless alternative.