Automate Your Tea Time

October 22, 2012 by 14 Comments

There are a couple of things that go into a great cup of tea. One is to have the water at the correct temperature, the other is to steep for just the right amount of time. This offering solves the latter by extracting the tea bag after a carefully timed steep.

It’s hard to imagine how this could be more simple. The timing mechanism is a cheap egg timer which has been modified to include a paperclip which moves with the minute hand. When the timer hits zero that paper clip contacts a stationary electrode, which powers the motor. That motor is the laser sled from a dead CD-ROM drive. Since these usually die because of the lens (not the mechanism) this is a great re-use of the internals. The sled zips to one side until it hits a limiting switch which kills the power. At the same time, this motion uses the wooden lever to extract the tea bag. All of this is explained in the clip after the jump.

Since the egg timer already has its own bell, you’ll even be alerted that it’s tea time!

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Portal Gun Hack Approaches 1.5 Million Views. More Fun Hacks To Come!

October 22, 2012 by 26 Comments

 

The quick and simple portal gun hack was published a little ver a week ago and has cleared almost 1.5 million views. This is just a taste of things to come as we plunge into creating more fun original content for hackaday. If you haven’t yet, you should go subscribe to our youtube channel.

We have many more exciting projects planned for the near future. Projects involving high voltage, lasers, and thermite! We could always use more ideas though. What projects would you like to see done? Think big, we want to remind people just how awesome hacking can be!

We now have access to some high speed cameras, a wonderful and professional gentleman named [Jay] who is an astounding video editor, and quite possibly the brightest readership in the universe. Let us know your ideas for awesome projects!

We’re *this* Close To A Real Pip-Boy

October 22, 2012 by 47 Comments

Whether inspired by the vaults of Fallout or the mysterious wrist device worn by [Turanga Leela], we’re just glad to see someone finally made a wrist-worn cellphone,

The Ultimate Wrist Watch, as the creator [Rob] calls it, is based on his Motorola Defy smart phone, tucked inside a neatly modified iPod wrist band meant to hold a runner’s music player. Simply mounting a cellphone to a wrist would be a bit awkward and a huge drain on battery life, so [Rob] wrote an app to automatically turn on the display when the accelerometer detects the phone is in the correct watch-reading position, and turns it off when [Rob] lowers his arm once again.

Right now the Ultimate Wrist Watch only stands in for the functions of a standard wrist watch – time, date, a chronometer and stopwatch are just about the only features implemented so far. Still, this is dangerously close to the wrist-mounted computers we’ve been promised for so long.

You can grab the source for the Ultimate Wrist Watch on [Rob]’s git, or just download it off Google Play. Check out the video of the Ultimate Wrist Watch after the break.

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Add An Arduino To A Google+ Hangout

October 22, 2012 by 3 Comments

Google+ Hangouts provide a group video chat with the ability to add apps. [RobotGrrl] created a Node.js web app to control an Arduino that can be added to a Hangout.

There’s a Javascript client that runs inside of the Hangout and communicates with the Node.js server running on an EC2 server over WebSockets. The server receives this client data and sends commands to Processing using TCP sockets. Processing deals with communicating with the Arduino, allowing you to control many things from the Hangout.

In this simple example, [RobotGrrl] demonstrates how to toggle an LED from the Hangout. This includes a tutorial on setting up your EC2 instance, full source for the server and client apps, the processing sketch to control an Arduino, and the code to allow the app to be added to a Hangout.

This example shows the basics, but there’s a whole slew of things that could be controlled with this system. [RobotGrrl] even demonstrates some robots that are controlled from a Hangout interface.

Check out an overview video after the break.

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Finally, Turning Plastic Pellets Into 3D Printer Filament

October 22, 2012 by 47 Comments

Here’s the situation: a kilogram of 3D printer filament costs about $50. A kilogram of plastic pellets costs less than a tenth of that. Does anyone have a solution to this problem?

For years now, the general consensus was making your own 3D printer filament at home was nigh impossible, dealing with temperatures, pressures, and tolerances that home-built machines simply can’t handle. [Bradley] sent in a filament extruder he made because he was disturbed at this current mindset that desktop filament factories have huge technical issues that have yet to be overcome.

[Bradley]’s extruder is based on the Lyman Filament Extruder, a machine that has successfully demonstrated taking plastic pellets, forming them into a filament, and having this filament used in the production of 3D printed parts. [Bradley]’s improvements include a variable-speed motor, a larger hot end, and an automatic timing system to produce set quantities of printer filament.

Of course, since Inventables threw $40,000 at the problem of creating filament at home there were bound to be more than a few successful designs making their way out into the public. When we last covered the developments of home filament manufacturing, the Filabot seemed to be in the lead. Now with [Bradley] (and  [Lyman])’s machines turning out usable filament, it’s only a matter of time before the 40 grand prize is snatched.

Halloween Light Show Gets An Upgrade

October 22, 2012 by 6 Comments

This is [Dave]’s second year of putting on a Halloween light show (cache), and his latest production has received some upgrades over last year’s Christmas show. He’s switched from Christmas style bulb lights to high brightness LEDs, and upgraded to 48 channels of control.

The controllers are from Light-O-Rama, and each provides 16 output channels. They communicate over RS-485; the same type of network used for controlling professional theater lights with the DMX512 protocol. The whole thing is powered by a 20 A DC supply from some Chinese retailer.

[Dave]’s show features light up pumpkins, tombstones, and faces mounted on his house. The lights are coordinated to a list of songs that he plays over an FM transmitter, allowing for cars to tune into the music that’s synced up with the lights.

If  you happen to be in Estacada, OR, you might want to head over to [Dave]’s and check out the show in person. Otherwise, there’s two videos of the light show after the break.

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Giving The Arduino Deques, Vectors And Streams With The Standard Template Library

October 22, 2012 by 20 Comments

The Arduino IDE is extremely similar to C++, but judging from the sketches you can find on the Internet, you’d never know it. Simpler Arduino projects can make do with just toggling IO pins, reading values, and sending serial data between two points. More complex builds fall into the category of real software development, and this is where the standard Arduino IDE falls miserably short.

[Andy] saw this lack of proper libraries for more complicated pieces of software as a terrible situation and decided to do something about it. He ported the SGI Standard Template Library to bring all those fun algorithms and data structures to any AVR chip, including the Arduino.

Going over what’s included in [Andy]’s port reads just like a syllabus for an object-oriented programming class. Stacks, queues, and lists make the cut, as do strings and vectors. Also included is just about everything in the   and headers along with a few Arduino-oriented additions like a hardware serial and liquid crystal streams.

With all these objects floating around, [Andy] says it will make an impact on Flash and SRAM usage in an AVR. Still, with all the hullabaloo over faster and larger ARM micros, it’s nice to see the classic 8-bit microcontroller becoming a bit more refined.