LED Cloud Lamp In Any Color You Can Imagine

January 17, 2013 by 30 Comments

rgb-cloud-lamp

This lamp which [Dablondeemu] built will add a little whimsy to your home decor. The project started as coursework for a Digital Art and Installations class. But the remote controlled color changing cloud ended up being a pretty neat gift for her little brother.

The prototype uses an Arduino, breadboard, and a collection of LEDs to perform its tasks. [Dablondeemu] admits the next revision should have a standalone circuit board. The electronics are housed in a clear plastic container which was then adorned with Polyfill stuffing which would commonly be found inside a decorative pillow. The polyester fibers do a great job or filtering and diffusing the light. But they don’t seem to interfere with the incoming IR signals from the remote control.

If you like the idea of creatively shaped diffusers you should take a look at this giant LED lamp. It’s molded to look like a through-hole package with the leads hiding the power cord.

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Build And Install Your Own High-end Cycling Power Meter

January 17, 2013 by 15 Comments

Cycling power meters can set you back quite a pretty penny. [Keith] quotes prices starting at $1500 and going up to $4000. We know several serious cyclists who would think twice about spending that on a bike, and wouldn’t even consider putting that kind of investment into an accessory for it. But if you’ve got the time [Keith] will show you how to build and install your own cycling power meter.

The link above is a roundup of all the posts and videos [Keith] made along the way. We’ve embedded his introduction video after the break where he discusses the goals of the project. The system allows for independently measuring the power of each leg. This is accomplished using strain gauges on the cranks to monitor torque. This data is combined with cadence measurements (how fast the rider is turning the cranks) which is all that is necessary to calculate the power output of the rider.

The parts list comes in at about $350. This doesn’t include the equipment he used to test and calibrate his calculations.

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Making Better Noises With Dual PWM

January 17, 2013 by 20 Comments

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Although it’s technically possible to get 16 bits of resolution on a ATMega328, most implementations of PWM on everyone’s favorite ‘mega – including just about every Arduino sketch – are limited to 8 bit PWM. This means the pins can only output 256 different values, so if you’re playing around with music made on an Arduino don’t expect very high fidelity.

There is a clever way around this: use two PWMs, and use one pin for high bytes and another for low bytes. That’s what Open Music Labs did when working on a synthesizer project that needed very high quality audio.

The basic idea behind the build is that PWM pins can be used to create audio frequencies. Using two PWM pins and adding them together means it’s possible to add extra bits of resolution. This requires using different values of resistors on each pin. For example, using the same value of resistors on two PWM pins increases the resolution by one bit. Two pins with a resistor value ratio of 1:4 increases the resolution by four bits, and so on.

There’s a great tutorial for setting up these higher resolution, dual PWM outputs on an ATMega or Arduino, as well as a distortion analysis for this dual PWM setup.

Raspi Astrophotography Board Also Does Everything Else

January 17, 2013 by 17 Comments

FPGA

A few years ago the folks at Astro Designs put together a board that took off-the-shelf CCD sensors from point and shoot cameras and turned them into respectable astrophotography sensors. Since then, the world has seen an explosion of Raspberry Pis, Arduinos, and other microcontroller platforms, making this the perfect time for a hardware revision.

Their PiXi-200, like their previous AstroCam board, is able to take image sensors out of cameras and turn them into telescope mounted cameras. That’s only one of its tricks, though: The PiXi-200 also has accelerometers, gyroscopes, enough UARTs to do just about anything, a four channel ADC and four channel DAC, two dozen GPIO pins, enough LEDs and buttons for any project, and a 200,000 gate FPGA. All this in a board that plugs directly into the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi just like an Arduino shield. Needless to say, there’s a lot you can do with this board.

Right now, the design is still in the prototype stage, but once everything is finalized the basic model of the board will sell for £30 GBP ($50 USD). The high-end “Model C” board, with all the bells and whistles, will sell for £45 GPB ($70 USD).

Script Defeats Minteye CAPTCHA

January 16, 2013 by 41 Comments

minteye-captcha-defeated

We hadn’t heard of minteye CAPTCHA before, but we’ve seen evidence of a script that can break the system. Minteye combines two things which you probably don’t love about the Internet: advertisements and CAPTCHA. The system uses a slider to distort an advertiser’s image. Once the slider is in just the right spot the image becomes clear and you can click on submit to see if you passed the challenge.

Challenges like this are impossible for the visually impaired, so there is usually an audio option as well. In this case the audio button will instruct you to move the slider to the right, left, or that it’s already in the correct place. [Samuirai] used the text2speech API available in Google Chrome to parse these commands. As you can see above, “movies later” is a misinterpretation of “move the slider”, but he was still able to get enough accuracy to solve the challenge. See the script in action in the video after the break.

Audio challenges have been exploited like this in the past. Check out this talk about beating reCAPTCHA through the audio option.

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Coffee Table Arcade Hides Its Controls

January 16, 2013 by 15 Comments

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[Hoogen] did a fantastic job of building arcade hardware into this Ikea coffee table. Sound familiar? We just looked at another Ikea coffee table arcade, but this one goes quite a different route. It uses a Ramvik table which has a very deep drawer in the end where the controls are located. The image to the left shows that you’re going to have a problem with the joystick when you try to close it. [Hoogen] came up with a clever mechanism to overcome this issue.

This is not an emulated system. It uses a JAMMA board called the iCade 60-in-1 to bring sixty classic arcade games to the build. To interface with this hardware [Hoogen] included a JAMMA full cabinet wiring harness. The inset image on the right is pretty small, but it shows the speaker mounted in the back of the drawer, as well as the control surface angled down. This tilting surface is what allows the controls to move out of the way when closing the drawer. This happens automatically as described by [Hoogen] in his write-up.

Polaroid Catcher Make Print Screen Do What It Says

January 16, 2013 by 6 Comments

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As part of their coursework at ITP New York a group of students developed the Polaroid Catcher. It’s a way to make your digital experiences more permanent. When you have something on-screen that you’d like to keep as a memory you can print the screen on this old Polaroid camera. Of course you’re not going to get the chemical-filled container you may remember from ages past. But we thing you’d agree the nostalgic camera makes a nice enclosure for a modern image printer.

The workings of the system are shown off quite well in the clip after the break. But we’re always interested in the particulars of how they pulled it off. The system uses a Google Chrome extension to capture what is being displayed in the browser. Before the image is sent to the printer the user has the opportunity to frame up the subject of the photo. Once decided, the image is pushed to a Bluetooth photo printer using some scripts written by the team.

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