Putting Yourself Inside A Display

March 8, 2013 by 3 Comments

dome

Here’s an interesting build that combines light, sound, and gesture recognition to make a 360 degree environment of light and sound. It’s called The Bit Dome, and while the pictures and video are very cool, we’re sure it’s more impressive in real life.

The dome is constructed of over a hundred triangles made of foam insulation sheet, resulting in a structure that is 10 feet in diameter and seven and a half feet tall. Every corner of these panels has an RGB LED driven by a Rainboduino, which is in turn controlled by a computer hooked up to a Kinect.

The process of interacting with the dome begins by stepping inside and activating the calibration process. By having the user point their arms at different points inside the dome, the computer can reliably tell where the user is pointing, and respond when the user cycles through the dome’s functions.

There are bunch of things this dome can do, such as allowing the user to conduct an audio-visual light show, run a meditation program, or even play Snake and Pac-Man. You can check out these games and more in the videos after the break.

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Pumping 1080p Video Out Of An FPGA

March 8, 2013 by 14 Comments

fpga-pumping-1080p

[Hamster] admits this 1080p HDMI hack for an FPGA doesn’t put a signal that’s fully up to specifications. But as you can see in the image above it does output a 1920×1080 image at 60 Hz, which is the size and frequency of full HD video. It falls just short due to some jitter, which may be just fine if this is only being used for early prototyping and will be replaced with a dedicated encoder later in the design process.

Here he’s chosen a Pipistrello board but thinks that any device which has a Spartan 6 chip with the differential pairs connected to an HDMI socket will work. The difficulty of the task comes in serializing four output channels at 1500 Mb/s each. Because of this just coding your logic isn’t going to work. After roughing out the design [Hamster] went back in and chose to manually place some of the components to ensure that data from each channel arrives at the same time.

While you’re messing with HDMI you may also want to give this overlay hack a try.

Hackerspace Develops Ways To Get Peeps To Spill Their Secrets

March 8, 2013 by 37 Comments

Peep-Electric-Chair-5

Whether you call it enhanced interrogation or torture, the subject is a lot less serious when the victim is a sugary confection. The LVL1 Hackerspace in Louisville, Kentucky recently held an event focused on getting Peeps — the bunny-shaped sugar-covered marshmallow treats — to spill their guts. Participants developed a range of tongue-in-cheek torture devices then demonstrated their functionality on the bunnies.

You shouldn’t be surprised that the event posting starts with Peep waterboarding. But from there the rigs do get a lot more creative. For instance, the electric chair above connects the bunny to a stun gun (there’s no mention of what that big set of capacitors has to do with this. There’s also an Iron Maiden which is really more of a Plastic Maiden. It subjects the marshmallow to multiple stab woulds using a plastic egg as an enclosure and a hair brush head as the spikes. You can’t mutilate Peeps without at least one being sent through a microwave. But perhaps our favorite is The Rack. A pair of them were built, one was laser cut and the other was constructed free-hand. Both are a whimsical take on a historically brutal implement.

Quick Wallet Hack Adds Pickpocket Alarm

March 8, 2013 by 60 Comments

Recently there were a bunch of videos going around the net about some of the greatest pickpockets in the world. Simply put, if they wanted something you had, they were going to take it and you probably wouldn’t notice. I’ve always kept my wallet in my front pocket, and usually with my hand on it, but they even showed them getting around that in the video (you can’t always be vigilant).

I had the idea to make some kind of alarm that would go off if anyone but me removed the wallet from my pocket. A quick google search revealed tons of wallet alarms, but I noticed that they all had a credit card form factor(that’s good) and would make noise when exposed to light(that’s bad). This represents a problem since the pickpockets in the videos tended not to open the wallets till later at another location. I needed something that would make noise as it was removed from my pocket. Most importantly, I needed the alarm to be located inside the wallet. This immediately makes the wallet undesirable and will hopefully make someone drop it like hot coals.

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Handwriting Suck? Build A Machine To Do It For You

March 8, 2013 by 76 Comments

calligraphy-machine

Children of the information age are doomed to have the worst handwriting just for lack of use if nothing more. But some students at Olin College harnessed technology to find a solution to that problem. Meet Herald, a CNC machine that can produce beautiful calligraphy.

The machine uses a gantry to move the writing tip along the X and Y axes. The flexible-nib calligraphy pen is mounted on a sprocket which rotates the tip onto the writing surface, taking care of the third axis. The rig was beautifully rendered from their CAD drawings, then tweaked to ensure the smoothest motion possible before the quintet of Sophomores began the physical build.

The drive hardware is very simple yet it produces great results. It uses an Arduino along with three stepper motor drivers. There are also limiting switches to protect the hardware from runaway code. The software interface designed by the team lets the user cut and paste their text, and select a font, font size, alignment, etc. It then converts the text to G-code and pushes it to the Arduino where the GRBL package takes care of business.

Don’t miss the device in action, writing out a [Langston Hughes] work in the clip after the break.

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Human Powered Emergency Cell Phone Charger

March 7, 2013 by 36 Comments

Emergency-human-powered-cell-phone-charger

Power outage? For the average citizen it’s very easy to take electricity for granted. Go a few hours or more without it though, and you’ll suddenly be reminded just what a luxury it is. During an emergency situation, sometimes you have to come up with alternative methods to get the job done. This human powered cell phone charger is a great example.

Using just a few ordinary around the house items, [The King of Random] turned a cordless electric drill into a human powered electrical generator. If the drill is run in reverse and cranked by hand, the generated energy can be transferred through the battery terminals to a connected device.  So, he cut a USB charger cable in half and wired it up to the terminals to be able to charge his cell phone. Some yarn, a salad fork, a mixing beater, a scrap 2″x4″, some aluminum foil, and scotch tape were the only other materials he used. Using this technique, a totally dead phone battery was charged in around 3 hours.

Remember that this method is only intended to be used in an emergency, not as every day practice. Using these methods could potentially overheat or damage your gear, so be careful.

Check out the MacGyver worthy video tutorial after the break.

[via Neatorama]

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Wireless Doorbell Battery Monitor

March 7, 2013 by 10 Comments

wireless-doorbell-battery-monitor

We know exactly what [Dan] is going through. We also bought a cheap wireless doorbell and are plagued by the batteries running down. When that happens, the only way you know is when people start pounding on the door because you’re not answering the bell. Well no more for [Dan]. He built a backup system which monitors the voltage of the batteries on the chime unit.

You can see the small bit of protoboard he used to house the microcontroller and the UI. It’s an ATtiny13 along with a green LED and a single push button. The idea is to use the chip’s ADC to monitor the voltage level of the pair of batteries which power the chime. When it drops below 3V the green LED will come on.

First off, we wish these things would come with better power supply circuits. For instance, we just replaced the CR2032 in an Apple TV remote and measured the voltage at 2.7V. That remote and the chime both run from a 3V source. Can’t they be made to work down to 1.8V? But we digress.

In addition to monitoring voltage [Dan’s] rig also counts the number of times the chime has rung. Every eight seconds it flashes the count in binary, unless he presses the red button to clear the count. This is shown in the video after the break. We guess he wants to know how many times this thing can be used before running the batteries down.

Seriously though, for a rarely used item like this how hard would it be to use ambient light harvesting to help save the batteries? Looking at some indoor solar harvesting numbers shows it might be impossible to only power this from PV, but what if there was a super-cap which would be topped off with a trickle from the panels but would still use the batteries when that runs down?

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