Robot Can Barely Move With So Much Hardware Strapped To It

December 24, 2012 by 4 Comments

web-server-robot

We think that [Andrej Škraba] needs to start looking for a beefier motor platform. This little robot has so much hardware strapped to it the motors can barely keep up. But with a little help it can make its way around the house, and it takes a whole lot of connectivity and computing power along for the ride.

The white stick on the top is a single-board computer. The MK802 Mini sports an A10 processor and up to a gig of ram. Just below that is a USB hub which is sitting on top of a USB battery pack. This powers the computer and gives him the ability to plug in more than one USB device. The robot chassis is from Pololu. It uses an Arduino and a motor shield for locomotion, with commands pushed to it via USB.

This setup makes programming very easy. Here [Andrej] has a keyboard and HDMI monitor plugged in to do a little work. When not coding it can be disconnected and driven over the network. He makes this happen using an Apache server on the MK802 and node.js. See a demo of the system in the clip after the break.

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A Concrete Table With A Little Blinky Built In

December 24, 2012 by 2 Comments

concrete-table-with-led-inlay

Members of the Warp Zone hackerspace wanted a coffee table that was beyond ordinary. They ended up pouring a concrete base for the glass top (translated). There were several things to address during the design. First off, they wanted to integrate LEDs in the concrete sides. Some consideration had to be made for portability as concrete is very heavy. The final piece of the puzzle was deciding what kind of hardware to place beneath the frosted glass.

The legs were designed with a large cut-out area to keep them as light weight as possible. The cross piece has a set of voids spelling out the name of the hackerspace with some green LEDs. This was accomplished by placing foam cut-outs of each letter in the forms before for concrete was poured. They sealed around each letter with silicone, but still had some seepage most likely caused when jostling the form to help remove air bubbles. Straws were placed in the foam to allow a cable pass through for the electronics. After everything was in place they filled the voids with hot glue to act as a diffuser.

There aren’t a lot of details about the RGB LEDs under the frosted glass. But you can see the light show they produce in the clip after the break.

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Olin College Penny Press

December 24, 2012 by 17 Comments

Olin Penny Press

Inspired by souvenir penny presses, [Robert] built the Olin College penny press. This machine stamps out coins with the school’s name and a variety of other patterns. He built it as part of a mechanical structures course, with the goal of designing something that used large forces.

Crushing a penny takes about five tons of force. To deliver that force, [Robert] used a 1 horsepower motor coupled to a custom 1190:1 reduction drive train, which consisted of sprockets, gears, and chains. The aluminium frame supporting the drive train also had to be designed to withstand large forces.

This required of a lot of custom parts, which were made using a CNC mill, a water jet cutter and a mill. All of the CAD drawings are available for anyone who wants to replicate the design.

This beast of a machine weighs about 90 pounds and can squish 12 pennies every minute. Olin College installed the penny press on their campus for anyone to use for free.

Hackaday Links: Christmas Eve, 2012

December 24, 2012 by 9 Comments

It’s Christmas Eve, the perfect time to interact with your extended familial units, eat cookies, nog things up a little, and watch Die Hard. Christmas Eve also means it’s a low-effort day here at Hackaday, so here’s a few cool things we’ve run across in the past few weeks.

A Round OLED Display

1_13inch_Round_OLED

That right there is a circular OLED display. [ArtistEngineer] over on reddit found this display on AliBaba. It’s a 1.13 inch diameter display with a resolution of 128×128 (yeah, we don’t know either). This looks like a great display for a DIY wrist watch, digital gauge, or loads of other devices where a square display doesn’t make much sense.

There seems to be a few circular OLED display manufacturers – including Truly Semiconductors who happened to put up a datasheet for their round display – but sourcing these in reasonable quantities is a pain. Anyone up for a group buy? Think of the fun you’ll have coding a polar coordinate display!

Computing with transistors

gate

So you know computers are made up of simple logic gates, latches, buffers, and other miscellaneous digital cruft,  but how do we turn these digital circuits into a computer? Over the last few months, [Andrew] has been putting up a bunch of blog posts on the application of digital logic. Start out on the ‘Computing with Transistors’ post before moving on to The Digital State and Circuits and Arithmetic. There’s some good readin’ there.

 Embedding 3D objects in a web page

Go ahead. Click it. It’s Sketchfab that allows anyone to publish interactive 3D designs without a browser plugin. If anyone out there is trying to build a Thingiverse clone that isn’t tied to Makerbot, consider using this for the preview page for each object.

Surprisingly, Twinkies were the one thing that didn’t survive the Apocalypse.

twinkie

While there’s no use in mourning the death of the Twinkie – Little Debbie also makes small cream-filled cakes – you might as well include some Twinkies, Snowballs, Ding Dongs, and Ho-Hos in your Christmas baking. [scoochmaroo] on Instructables put together a list of homebrew recipes for the now defunct Hostess snack cakes.

Perfect for autonomous robots

code

[maxogden] over on the gits put together a script for automatically joining wireless networks on Linux. This was tested on a Raspberry Pi, and we’re thinking it would be perfect for whatever autonomous creation you’ll be building in your workshop next year.

Pulling The LCD Screens Out Of A MyVu Glasses Display

December 24, 2012 by 5 Comments

myvu-led-module-teardown

[John Floren] really sells us on a pair of MyVu 301 Video Glasses. He lists the features as being bulky, ugly, and uncomfortable. That’s the reason why he’s showing you how to crack open the glasses in order to steal the tiny LCD modules.

The LCD screen for each eye is mounted inside of the assembly seen above. The screen is perpendicular to the wearer’s eye, with some space in the body to facilitate the lens and reflector that enlarge the image and direct it toward the eye. After removing the display from the module [John] tried to hook it up to a camera via the driver hardware which comes with the glasses. It must have been a bit of a head scratcher that all he could get was a plain white image. This is fixed by finding the polarizing filter inside the module and laying it over the screen. This is demonstrated in the clip after the break.

We don’t know where he’s planning to go from here, but we can suggest a few different projects. This hardware could be useful in creating his own augmented reality hat. Using it as a video game controller is another thing that pops to mind. Wouldn’t it be cool to have this in the scope sight of a light gun?

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Animated Holiday Wreath From A String Of LED Lights

December 23, 2012 by 5 Comments

animated-holiday-wreath

[Dennis Adams’] wreath lights project looks pretty good. But he did some amazing coding to produce a whole set of interesting animated patterns that really seal the deal for the project. Don’t miss the video after the break where he shows off all of his hard work.

He started with a string individually addressable LEDs. These are the 12mm variety like what Adafruit sells (we’ve seen them popping up in a number of projects). To mount each pixel he tried a several different prototypes before settling on a ring that was 14″ in diameter. The design was laser cut from acrylic, with sets of staggered holes to host each ring of LEDs. The final touch was to add ping-pong balls to diffuse the light.

As we mentioned earlier, the light patterns really add the finishing touch to the project, but there is more functionality there too. [Dennis] rolled in the ability to monitor a Twitter feed with the wreath. When he gets a new tweet, a different animation will let him know about it.

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Sensor Sleeve Makes Tablet Use Easier And Benefitial For Disabled Children

December 23, 2012 by 10 Comments

tablet-accessiblity-hack

Pinch-zoom is a godsend (and shouldn’t be patent-able) and although we mourn the loss of a physical keyboard on a lot of device we use a tablet nearly as often as we do a full computer. But the touch screen interface is not open to everyone. Those who lack full dexterity of their digits will find the interface frustrating at best or completely unusable at worst. A team of researchers from the Atlanta Pediatric Device Consortium came up with a way to control touch-screen tablets with a sensor array that mounts on your arm.

The project — called Access4Kids — looks not only to make tablet use possible, but to use it as a means of rehabilitation. The iPad seen above is running a custom app designed for use with the sensor sleeve. The interface is explained in the video after the break. Each sensor can serve as an individual button, but the hardware can also process sequential input from all three as a swipe in one direction or the other. If they can get the kids interested in the game it ends up being its own physical therapy coach by encouraging them to practice their upper body motor skills.

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