Car Stereo Hack Gives Your Party Tunes And An Extra Place To Sit

March 29, 2013 by 21 Comments

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With summer on the horizon it’s time to start thinking about outdoor leisure. [x2Jiggy] is chomping at the bit having recently completed this project. It’s a portable stereo that also gives you somewhere to sit.

Unlike several of these types of project, he didn’t build the system inside of a cooler. Instead, the chassis was built from scratch using MDF. This material is strong and easy to work with, but we’d bet the finished case is a beast to haul around because of the weight. At least there’s a heavy-duty handle on either side so that you and a buddy can split the burden. One nice perk is that it’ll make a sturdy yet comfortable seat thanks the padded and upholstered top.

The audio components that went into it are all automotive parts and shouldn’t mind being jostled during transport. A computer PSU provides the 12V needed by the stereo. But there are a couple of external rail connections if you want to haul around a 12V battery instead.

Little Sister’s Turn For Hobby Electronic Party Favors

January 15, 2013 by 10 Comments

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[Ian Lee, Sr.] made something special for his daughter’s birthday party. It’s pretty common for girls of this age (this was her 5th birthday) to be enthralled with stories of princesses so he made a blinky princess wand for each party guest. The motivation came when she asked what special thing he was going to do for her celebration. You may remember seeing the LED badge kits that were featured at her brother’s party earlier this year. From the look of the party guests he surely satisfied her desire for a memorable party.

The project is very inexpensive, extremely easy to assemble, and might make a perfect kit for supervised Kindergarteners. It’s basically an LED throwie with a stick and a feather added. [Ian] used CR2032 batteries along with an LED and current limiting resistor to light things up. He clipped off one leg of the LED and replaced it by soldering the LED in place. The remaining leads were then pressed to either side of the coin cell and the whole thing was shoved into a slit cut in the end of a balloon rod. The whole thing was wrapped tightly in with a rubber band before being crowned with a ping pong ball. To trim it out he hot glued a feather at the base of the ball.

The only think that has us worried is what he’s going to do next year to top these parties.

Thinking Cap Is Also Party Hat

November 5, 2012 by 10 Comments

The Thinking Cap is a piece of wearable signage that lets you display what’s on your mind. The hat uses a Teensy 2.0 connected to a Bluetooth radio to allow the wearer to update the message on the fly, letting the room know what their thinking at that instant.

This hack is based off of LPD8806 controlled LED strips, which are becoming very popular for adding lots of LEDs to anything. There are five strips that need to be controlled over SPI, but the Teensy only has one SPI peripheral.

This lead to the use of multiplexer to allow for controlling each strip individually. The hat uses an interesting and low cost scheme to multiplex five channels using two 744052 dual 4 channel multiplexors and a 7400 inverter.

The Teensy can receive messages using the Bluetooth serial port protocol. The 5 x 7 pixel characters are stored in a framebuffer, and shifted around the hat to create the animation.

The result is a bright message circling around the user’s head, which can be updated with a smartphone over Bluetooth. Check out a video demo of the hat after the break.

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Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robot Costumes Make Party Conversation Awkward

October 31, 2012 by 4 Comments

Don’t get us wrong, we love these Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robot costumes. But as with that Samus Helmet it must make party conversation a bit weird. And how do you hold on to your beer? But you’ve got to commend [EyeHeartInk] and his friend for their commitment. Not only did they wear them to the party, but they spent two months building the things.

Pretty much everything was made from cardboard. All of it was hand cut with a box cutter and a hobby knife. Duct tape and glue were the adhesives of choice, and according to this thread a total of fifteen rolls of tape were used. The half spheres on the side of either helmet were molded from expanding spray foam inside a ping-pong ball which had been lopped in half. And of course there are a pair of LEDs for the eyes of each bot.

We usually try to link to other articles that are related, but it doesn’t look like we’ve seen this concept before So you’ll have to settle for this non-Halloween wristwatch controlled robot boxing game.

 

Nyan Cat Hat Will Be The Hit Of The Party…. For About One Minute

October 30, 2012 by 26 Comments

Seriously, this Nyan Cat hat is the only part needed for a fantastic Halloween costume. It looks pretty good in this still image, but we dare you to watch the clip of it in action (embedded after the break) without letting a beaming grin creep onto your face. Everyone’s going to just love this… until it starts to get really annoying.

When switched on, the iconic meme rotates around the headgear, bobbing its head and tail as she sings the song of her people. There are also stars made of white LEDs that twinkle very brightly in the process. The presentation is quite good, but even better is seeing the build process. Luckily [Ben Katz] posted a series of detailed articles during the adventure. The mechanism responsible for driving the cat around the hat was laser cut from acrylic. It includes a large gear with teeth on the inside, which is interface by a continuously rotating servo motor with a much smaller gear. The head and tail bobbing are purely mechanical, using the revolving motion to turn a spindle as the cat makes its way around the brim.

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How To Build A Foam Machine For Your Next Party

September 28, 2012 by 5 Comments

Your neighbors are going to love you if you start filling up the back yard with foam at your next party. It’s an easy enough build, but depending on your ability to source the major components it could cost a pretty penny to use it at your next rager.

[Species287] used a big fan and water pump which he already had on hand. All together that saved him about $200 (he’s pricing in Australian Dollars but they’re almost even right now with USD). The soap solution is super cheap, just a bottle of dish washing liquid mixed to the correct proportions with water, but you’ll need a way to apply it to the fan. Some irrigation supplies connected to the fan grate with zip ties did the trick. The pump is submerged in the bubble liquid, causing it to spray from the nozzles near the fan. But this won’t actually create bubbles. The last piece is a bag-shaped hunk of shade cloth from the garden store. Each pore of the cloth acts as a bubble ring. The cloth gets sprayed with soap by the sprinklers and the air from the fan then blows the bubbles.

There’s no video of this project so if you want to see it in action this other diy foam cannon will have to do.

Party Photo Printer Built Around A Raspberry Pi

August 29, 2012 by 12 Comments

We think [Brian Delacruz] latched on to a good idea with this photo printer project. Instead of building a big photo booth for his party he developed a Raspberry Pi based WiFi photo printer. Right now it’s a prototype that lacks the kind of polish necessary to make a true user-friendly device. But the idea is solid and just waiting for you to improve upon it.

In addition to the RPi he’s using a quality photo printer and a small wireless router. The router simply provides WiFi capabilities for the RPi which is running a web server, mySQL, and FTP. This provides a wide range of upload options which he can work with. Watch the video after the break to see him print a smart phone photo wirelessly.

This can be simplified by using a package like hostapd to use a USB WiFi dongle as an access point. Or if the venue already has Internet access a server could be set up with a QR code to guide people to it. The party starts off with an empty bulletin board and guests would be invited to print and hang their own photos which will go into the host’s guest book/scrap book to remember the event.