Twittering Toots, A Chair’s Perspective

twit

We might have to add a category of “stuff made to twitter”. The latest installment is an office chair that twitters whenever it gets farted on. The author has a smart sounding description as to why he decided to make this, and he has a pretty good point about twittering interrupting the things you’re twittering about, but it all boils down to the fact that he wants to twitter his farts. We can’t say that we didn’t expect something along these lines. He has mounted a natural gas sensor in his chair, along with a squidbee wireless transceiver. You can download all the code as well as see the construction in the instructable. You can also follow his flatulent adventures on the twitter account of the office chair.

LED Coffee Table

Spark Fun’s centerpiece at Maker Faire back in May was this LED coffee table. They just recently posted about how it was constructed. The surface is made from 64 8×8 RGB LED matrix boards totaling 4096 LEDs. The eight rows are connected to a custom router board so that one SPI line can control the entire display. The main microcontroller is an Olimex LPC2106 dev board. It runs a four player cooperative pong game where multiple balls are added over time. Each player gets a classic Atari paddle for control. You can see a video of the table running a screensaver after the break. Continue reading “LED Coffee Table”

Das Uber Airsoft Gun Turret


Hot on the heels of the Wii missile launcher, Das Uber Airsoft Gun Turret is here to put our past airsoft turrets to shame. Made by [Miltron_B], this autonomous beast not only has gorgeous LED indicators, it has lasers. Three of them. Three freaking lasers. Take a moment to wipe the drool from your chin.

We’ve seen plenty of turrets before, but this one really excels in design. It features two webcams for more precision detection and tracking and when set to manual mode, it can be controlled with an XBox 360 controller. He’s posted great pictures of the process with a step by step break down. Tons of useful links are included to help you out.

Someone should construct a Portal sentry gun case for this thing and add voice clips.

Air Hockey Robot


Don’t be ashamed, we suck at air hockey too. Luckily for us, we now have a robot opponent to blame or losing streak on. Engineers at Nuvation didn’t build this air hockey playing robot, they simply adapted a standard industrial robot arm for the task. It is controlled jointly by a ColdFire processor and a 9S08 microcontroller. An array of high power LEDs and a camera are positioned over the air hockey table, which captures the position of the puck. The robot reportedly wins 90% of its games, even against solid opponents. While this is more of project to show the power of ColdFire processors, we can’t help but think it will lead to a rash of unbeatable robot opponents. We’ve already been robo-owned at foosball; what’s next?

Forced Air Laptop Cooling


We’ve seen some exotic laptop cooling solutions before. This one caught my eye for one reason – I’ve got an e1705 myself. (Complete with chipping media button paint). It’s not the most stylish, but [WhiskeySix] combined some PVC pipe and an adjustable high flow fan to give his dell a major airflow upgrade. I’d like to see one built that mates to the exhaust ports on the rear. Sure, it’s not pretty, but he was able to increase his frame rate by 50%. Thanks to [Wimpinator] for the tip.

Wave Bubble Portable RF Jammer


Hack-A-Day friend [Limor] AKA [ladyada] has been promising a portable RF jammer for a while. guess what she sent me for Christmas? The Wave-bubble is a self tuning RF jammer – good for around 20 feet of RF enforced peace. (It outputs .1-.3 watts) With a pair of less efficient antennas, it even fits inside a pack of cigarettes. She’ll never sell these because the FCC would come-a-knockin, but if you’ve got some major skills, you might be able to build one. (I’m going to believe her take on this, I’ve seen her work in person and it’s some damn fine stuff)

Merry Christmas! Get your Design Challenge entries in today!

HOW-TO: Portable Car Pc

car pc
Today’s project comes from reader Douglas J. Hickok. A practical, portable car computer design it is intended to be easy to use in the car, but also easily removable.

A practical, portable car computer design
By Douglas J. Hickok

Introduction

What do you think of when I say “car computer”?  An expensive special piece of hardware that’s permanently mounted in a hidden spot in your car?  Probably?  For the last six months, I’ve been designing and building a portable computer.  By portable, I mean it can be plugged in as an ad-hoc server, workstation, media player, or GPS navigator just about anywhere — including my car.  Even though it was designed mostly as a car computer, who said it had to stay in my car?  And at the cost of a typical desktop system, why should it stay on my desk?  Car computers aren’t just for the rich anymore?

Continue reading “HOW-TO: Portable Car Pc”