[Easton’s] Animatronic Hand Gets 3D Printed Upgrade

August 29, 2011 by 10 Comments

[Easton] as been working with [Jeremy Blum] to come up with the newest version of his animatronic hand. You may remember seeing [Easton’s] first animatronic hand, with which he won his regional science fair and made a trip to nations. Since then he’s been working on improvements, and with access to [Jeremy’s] Makerbot he harnessed the power of open source design to make his own printed hand, extending a different Thingiverse project.

He’s still using the original sensor glove as a controller. It sends commands to the Arduino controlling the arm via an Xbee module. From there, five servos inside a fiberglass forearm move each finger and the thumb. The video clip after the break gives [Easton] a chance to show off all of the new design features, and finishes with a demonstration of the hand grasping different objects. We had a chance to chat with him briefly. He’s got big goals for himself, aiming to design a prosthetic arm for under $1000. That’s not a career goal… he’d like to get it done this year.

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Got An ILight?

August 29, 2011 by 17 Comments

[KaRMaN] sent us a piece from his blog on what to do with a busted iPhone (google translate). As many iPhone owners have found out, it does not take that much of a fall to render your shiny hand-held command center into a pile of shattered glass. Replacement parts and insurance are available so life goes on, but what else can you do?

One thing you could do if your screen split apart like [KaRMaN]’s is remove the white LED back light strip from the device and reuse it. Once he removed the LED he had to repair a couple of traces but that is no big deal. Then the strip is probed to see how the individual LED’s are situated, in this case is 6 in series. The strip is hooked up to a 12v power source and now you have a small, but bright light for some midnight hacking.

Revolights Keep You Safe While Riding At Night

August 29, 2011 by 42 Comments

revolights_bike_headlight_taillight

Bicycling at night can be a potentially hazardous endeavor for several reasons, but primarily because well, it’s dark. Inattentive drivers, weather, and other factors aside, the most important thing you can do to keep yourself safe is to ensure that you can see and that you are seen by others.

Revolights, an invention put together by [Kent Frankovich, Adam Pettler, and Jim Houk], is an ingenious way of accomplishing both of those things. The ring-shaped system attaches to nearly any bike tire, and includes LEDs that shine like a car’s head and taillights. A magnet attached to the bike’s fork triggers the onboard microcontroller to light only 4 LEDs at a time, letting persistence of vision take care of the rest.

We think it’s a great idea, and clearly others do as well. With nearly a month left on their Kickstarter page, they have nearly doubled their initial funding goal.

Check out the video presentation on their Kickstarter page to get a better look at the Revolights project.

[Thanks, medix]

Mineable Minecraft Block

August 29, 2011 by 15 Comments

At Hack A Day, we’re pretty big Minecraft fans so you can imagine our interest when we saw [Ben Purdy]’s real-life Minecraft block. The build uses a projector system to display a block onto a cardboard box and reacts to being ‘mined’ just like in the game.

Block animation is handled by a piezo sensor, an Arduino and a Processing sketch. From earlier posts on [Ben’s] blog, we’re going to guess that he used the keystone video projection library his own solution to map the Minecraft block onto the cardboard box. Animation is handled just as in Minecraft – overlaying the breaking animation onto the block and adding some particle effects.

We’ve seen a few Minecraft hacks before, like using it as a 3D design tool, and connecting your redstone CPU to the outside world. [Ben]’s build follows in the tradition of its forebears and is something we really want to try out. Check out the demos after the break.

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crazy_cat_elevator

A Cat Elevator, For The Discerning Lazy Feline In Your Life

August 29, 2011 by 36 Comments

Ah, to live the life of a cat. The lazing about, the food delivered on demand, and the elevators – oh the glorious elevators.

No you didn’t misread and we haven’t gone crazy. We were sent a link to the video below just the other day, and while it is nearly two years old, it was new to us. From the very brief description on YouTube, it looks as if the elevator senses the cat’s entry using infrared, locking the door behind the cat before transporting it to another level of the house. While it’s often implied that cats are incredibly lazy, this contraption definitely takes things above and beyond the norm.

It’s a pretty ridiculous system if you ask us, but it’s pretty compelling just the same. If you can find any more information on it, we’d love to hear about it in the comments. If you can’t, feel free to speculate as to how you would build a cat elevator, or elaborate on the crazy contraptions you’ve built for the lazy felines in your life.

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MindFlex Watches As You Judge Others By Sight Alone

August 29, 2011 by 11 Comments

mindflex_headset

[Paul] really wanted to know what his brain was thinking.

No, really. He is aware of all the thoughts that come and go, but he wanted to know what was going on in his brain below his conscious thought stream. Armed with a MindFlex headset and a Teensy, he set out to decode what really was going on inside his head.

He spent a month crawling 35 million Google profiles, downloading each user’s pictures into a MySQL database. The Teensy was attached to the MindFlex sensor board, and collects all of the headset’s output over a serial connection.

His experiment consisted of flashing each of the profile pictures on his monitor for one second, recording 2 of the 11 available brainwave channels from the MindFlex. These values were then plotted out so that he could visualize the “Attention” and “Meditation” values captured by the headset. At the end of the day he discovered, interestingly enough, that looking at dogs relaxed him the most!

We would love to see what correlations could be drawn from his collected data, and what sorts of “hidden” thoughts are coursing through others’ brains. It could certainly end up being a double-edged sword, uncovering subconscious biases and other such things, but it’s an incredibly intriguing experiment to say the least.

Be sure to check out the video below of the experiment in progress.

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Video: Learning Eagle CAD Part I – Schematic & Custom Parts

August 29, 2011 by 33 Comments

This week we are starting in on a series of videos that are pretty different from the past few. Most hackers go through a phase where they etch their own circuit boards. This lasts for a few projects until they need to use a surface mount part, need many circuit boards to be made, or just don’t have the time needed to do everything themselves. In this video [Jack] starts a multi-part series about how to use Eagle CAD, which is a program that allows you to design your own circuit boards that you can then send out to be manufactured. Eagle CAD has a free version of their software that fits just perfectly with a beginner’s budget. There are other free layout programs out there but this one is arguably the best. Eagle CAD has a steeper learning curve than others but has some pretty powerful features to justify the extra effort that you have to expend to get going with it.

This video starts showing the schematic and library portions of the program. We have also added several supplementary videos on our YouTube channel that explain some of the tools in the tool palette in greater detail.