Mailbox Notifier Texts When The Letter Carrier Arrives

March 13, 2013 by 71 Comments

mailbox-notifier

[Felix Rusu’s] mailbox is on the other side of the street and he’s got a pretty big front yard. This means checking for mail is not just a pop your head out of the door type of activity. This becomes especially noticeable during the winter months when he has to bundle up and trudge through the snow to see if his letter carrier has been there yet. But he’s made pointless trips a thing of the past by building a notifier that monitors the mailbox for him.

He’s using a Moteino, which is an Arduino clone of his own making. It’s tiny and features an RF module on the underside of the board which takes care of communicating with a base station inside the house. The module seen above rolls the microcontroller board up along with a 9V battery and a hall effect sensor which can tell if the mailbox door is open or closed. When the Arduino detects a change to that sensor it pushes some data back to the base station which then relays the info to a computer or Raspberry Pi in order to send him a text message. All of this is shown off in the video after the break.

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Remote Control Car That Packs Its Own Beretta

March 13, 2013 by 82 Comments

remote-control-car-packs-a-beretta

We’ve never really thought to ourselves “This RC car is fun, but it really needs more handguns”. And if we did, it certainly would not be a built to undertake with students. But to each his own. [Jerod Michel] is a mathematician working in China. He recently built the project seen above with a group of students. Look closely and you’ll notice that the remote control car includes a remote control Beretta strapped to the side.

He doesn’t have a blog post about the project, but you can find a couple of images and his build instructions after the break. The firearm has a motor attached to the trigger that allows it to be fired by tapping into one of the extra channels on the RC car’s PCB. But you won’t just be firing blindly. The project also includes a video transmitter which can be viewed from an LCD screen mounted on top of the remote control unit. There’s even a laser sight that will show what you’re aiming at.

We wonder what the recoil of the firearm does to this light-weight vehicle?

Build Instructions (.txt file)

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A Clock That Uses Sixty RGB Pixels

March 13, 2013 by 11 Comments

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Here’s a project inspired by a highly polished art piece. [Tobias] has been working on his own RGB LED clock which uses one light for each minute in an hour. He was inspired to start the project after seeing the Equinox clock. That one used a little PCB for each LED, and included an acrylic bezel and diffusers for each light. With the advent of LED pixel strings assembling one of these for yourself has become quite a bit easier.

The key part of the project is the laser-cut plywood frame which has a finger between each digit in order to perfectly space the lights. Each pixel is hot glued in place, with the Arduino board which drives them at the center of the frame. These lights are super bright, so [Tobias] also included a light dependent resistor which allows the system to measure ambient light and modulate the pixel brightness accordingly.

There are four parts to his project post so make sure you take some time to click around in order to get all the gritty details.

Briquette Press For Rocket Stove Fuel

March 13, 2013 by 23 Comments

briquette-press-for-rocket-stove

[Gregory] uses a rocket stove for heating when it’s cold outside. He’s been trying out all kinds of different materials as fuel when the idea of making his own briquettes from waste materials came to mind. Obviously the project works. As you can see in the image above, he has just formed a lump of fuel using a mixture of newspaper pulp and sawdust.

The orange device with the ax handle seen in the background is his own creation. You can see the device in action in the video after the break. In the video comments he also links to a CAD file if you’re interested in building your own.

If it’s a rocket stove you’re interested in there’s always the option of building your own.

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Hinged NES Case Hides An Integrated LCD Screen

March 12, 2013 by 28 Comments

We’ve sure been seeing a lot of original NES cases used in projects lately. This time around the thing still plays the original cartridges. This was one of the mains goals which [Maenggu] set for himself when integrating the LCD screen with the gaming console. There is a quick video clip which shows off the functionality of the device. It’s embedded after the break along with a few extra images.

To our eye the NES looks completely unmodified when the case is closed. The cartridge slot still accepts games, but you don’t have to lower the frame into place once that cartridge has been inserted. The image above shows a ribbon cable connecting the top and bottom halves of the build. It routes the signals for both the LCD screen and the cartridge adapter to the hardware in the base. He mentions that he used the original power supply. We’re not sure if the original motherboard is used as well or if this is using some type of emulator.

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A Clever Solution For Constantly Locking Workstations

March 12, 2013 by 57 Comments

ROBOT

[Vasilis] works at CERN, and like any large organization that invented the World Wide Web, they take computer security pretty seriously. One ‘feature’ the IT staff implemented is locking the desktop whenever the screen saver runs. When [Vasilis] is in his office but not at his battlestation, the screen saver invariably runs, locking the desktop, and greatly annoying [Vasilis].

The usual Hackaday solution to this problem would be a complex arrangement of RFID tags, webcams, and hundreds, if not thousands of lines of code. [Vasilis] came up with a much better solution: have the computer ping his phone over Bluetooth. If the phone is detected by the computer, kill the screen saver.

The code is up on Github. It’s not much – just 20 lines of a Bash script – but it’s just enough to prevent the aggravation of typing in a password dozens of times a day.

Playing MAME Games On A RGB Laser Projector

March 12, 2013 by 28 Comments

MAME Laser Projector

Vector based displays were used for arcade games in the ’70s and ’80s. A typical CRT uses raster graphics, which are displayed by deflecting a beam in a grid pattern onto a phosphor. A vector display deflects the beam in lines rather than a full grid, drawing only the needed vectors. Perhaps the best known vector game is the original Asteroids.

[Jeremy] built up a RGB laser projector, and wanted to run some classic arcade titles on it. He started off by using the XMAME emulator, but had to modify it to communicate with the laser and reduce flicker on the display.

To control the laser, a modified version of OpenLase was used. This had to be enhanced to support RGB color. The modified sources for both the MAME emulator and OpenLase are available on Github.

[Jeremy]’s friend, [Steve], even got a vector based game that he wrote working on the system. “World War vi” is a shoot-em-up battle about the vi and emacs text editors.

The results of the build are shown in a series of videos after the break.

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