This Cube Of Playroom Drawers Is Quite Puzzling

October 11, 2011 by 18 Comments

If you’re looking for a piece of custom furniture to anchor your child’s playroom, this Rubik’s cube chest of drawers is just the thing. [Makendo] went the extra couple of miles on the project, building the entire thing from scratch and adding one clever feature after another to make it something special.

It’s made up of three plywood boxes, open on one side to accept a plywood drawer. The drawers were carefully fitted so that it is difficult to see which side is actually the drawer face. [Makendo] even routed a hash-mark of grooves into each face of the cube to make it look like the seams that make up the 9×9 grid of colored squares. Speaking of those colors, the “stickers” themselves are made of 1/4″ plywood and are not permanently affixed. Each is held on with a magnet plus a pair of dowels to keep it from spinning. This way you can rearrange the colors as often as you please.

Each layer of the cube spins thanks to some lazy susan bearings. [Makendo] didn’t want to add too much distance between the different modules so he routed out each side to fit the circular hardware. As a final touch, the drawers themselves can be locked in place using a dowel underneath one of the colored squares. We’ve embedded a video of the cube at play after the break.

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See Where Socks Has Been Using A GPS Tracking Collar

October 11, 2011 by 32 Comments

[Buxtronix] wanted to know where his cat (named Ash, but we thought Socks sounded much more cliché) was going when on the loose. He designed a GPS tracking collar and a way to map the data it collects.

The hardware actually turns out to be very simple. He needed a GPS module to gather location data, and a way to store that information having decided that live broadcast was not feasible. He hit SparkFun because they have a GPS module that is small enough for a cat collar, and outputs data with one serial pin. Unfortunately this module is no longer available, but if you have a similarly sized replacement let us know in the comments. Data capture is made easy by this device, you just need to record the serial data as it comes down the pipeline. [Buxtronix] used an OpenLog board as it dumps the data onto an SD card. When [Ash] returns from his roaming, [Buxtronix] grabs the SD card, and uses a Python script to convert the NMEA data to KML format which can be overlaid on Google Earth and Google Maps.

Announcing Our Next Theme: Halloween Hacks

October 11, 2011 by 5 Comments

It seems every year, Hack A Day is a little bit behind the times when it comes to Halloween hacks. Builds like the Mario costumes and the house singing Thriller are great, but it makes a lot more sense for us to post them before Halloween.

To introduce our Halloween theme, we’d like to present [heavyweighthowe]’s Halloween project. It’s a small lighting automation build that syncs a string of lights to the theme of the best Halloween Christmas 2nd best [Tim Burton] movie, The Nightmare Before Christmas. [heavyweighthowe] used Vixen to sequence the lights and an Arduino to interpret the serial commands from Vixen. It’s a nice build that would look great sitting on a porch next to a giant bowl of candy.

If you’ve got a Halloween build you’d like to show off, like a haunted house ride an awesome costume or even a really great Jack-O-Lantern, send it in on the tip line. We’re planning on putting up at least one Halloween post a day, so keep sending in those builds.

Genetic Testing With Lego

October 11, 2011 by 7 Comments

From the dark recesses of the Internet circa 2009 comes the BioBrick-A-Bot, a liquid handling system for molecular biologists.

The 2009 iGEM competition was a student competition to build devices for synthetic biology. The BioBrick-A-Bot’s goal is to build a simple, low-cost liquid handling system that sucks liquids out of petri dishes and into vials.

Like most lab equipment, the commercial version of this tech is insanely expensive – about 10 grand for a commercial liquid handling robot. The BioBrick-A-Bot is made nearly entirely out of LEGO parts, so the cost of the entire system was brought down to about $700.

There are two main parts to the BioBrick-A-Bot. The Alpha module holds four pipette on a delta platform We’ve seen this type of robot built out of LEGO before, but moving liquids is new territory. The Phi module contains all the mechanics to suck microliters of liquid into a pipette and spit them out into vials.

The BioBrick-A-Bot didn’t win the 2009 iGEM competition (that honor was taken by students from Heidelberg Cambridge), but we’d take a LEGO robot any day of the week. Check out the demo after the break.

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Building A Multidimensional Display From Trash

October 11, 2011 by 17 Comments

Here’s a simple concept that will let you turn any LCD screen into a multidimensional display (translated). [Herdek] used bits of that impossible to open clear plastic packaging to construct this add-on for the smart phone seen above. Three pieces of the material have been mounted at a 45 degree angle between the screen and viewer. The material is both reflective and transparent, depending on the angle at which light hits it. This allows it to reflect the light from the screen toward the viewer, but let light from the baffles behind it pass through unimpeded. The three baffles allow the LCD to be partitioned into three different sections whose images will appear to be at different depths according to the viewer’s vantage point. After the break we’ve embedded a demonstration video, as well as the how-to that shows the construction technique for the add-on.

This follows the same concept at the pyramidal volumetric display, which is still one of our favorite LCD hacks.

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Simple Circuit Reminds You To Lock The Door As You Rush Out Of The House

October 11, 2011 by 24 Comments

door_lock_minder

It seems that [pppd] is always rushing out of his apartment to catch the bus, and he finds himself frequently questioning whether or not he remembered to lock the door. He often doubles back to check, and while he has never actually forgotten to lock the door, he would rather not deal with the worry.

Since he finally had some free time on his hands, he decided to put together a simple device that would help end his worry once and for all. Using an ATtiny13, [pppd] designed a circuit that would detect when his door has been unlocked and opened, beeping every few seconds until the lock is reengaged. The circuit relies on a reed switch installed inside the door frame, which is tripped by the magnet he glued to his door’s deadbolt.

He says that the system works well so far, though he does have a few improvements in mind already.

Link Spam Your Friends With Printed QR Codes

October 10, 2011 by 39 Comments

qr_printer_sharing_links

While [Oryx] is down with social media like Facebook and Twitter, there are times when he wants to share things with people he is hanging out with in the real world. Sure, he could always email his friends links to the latest video of a cat doing something totally hilarious, but he wanted something a bit more tangible.

He had a small thermal printer from SparkFun kicking around, and thought it would be the ideal medium for sharing things with others. He sat down and put together a bit of code that allows him to interface the printer with his computer, generating QR codes from his web browser with the simple click of a button. Now, when he wants to pass something along to a friend, he can quickly print out a label bearing both a QR code and URL for easy access later on.

All in all it’s an interesting idea, though we would be curious to see what would happen if we handed our non-techie friends a printed QR code.