Remote-controlled Robot Toy From Air Freshener Parts

March 7, 2011 by Mike Nathan 6 Comments

[jcopro] is pretty fond of Glade automatic air fresheners. Using a pair of them, he built a simple remote-controlled toy which he shared with us over the weekend. You may remember that he built a remote shutter release system for his camera using these air fresheners, which we featured a few weeks ago.

Instead of throwing away the shell of the air fresheners after gutting them for motors and gears, he decided to use the excess plastic as a robot chassis. Using a pair of pencils for legs, he constructed his robot, “Limpy.” He removed a pair of motors and control board from an old toy, mounting it to his creation with a few strips of electrical tape.

He admits that he’s reluctant to even call the toy a robot, but he had fun building it, and suggests that it would make a great beginner project. We agree – it would make a great project for kids, especially if you are looking to reuse an old remote-controlled toy they no longer play with.

Continue reading “Remote-controlled Robot Toy From Air Freshener Parts” →

Minty FM Transmitter

March 7, 2011 by Kevin Dady 15 Comments

[Chis] wanted an FM transmitter bug device packed in a mint tin, and that is just what he made. Featuring only 17 discrete parts, running off of a 3volt coin cell battery, and small enough to fit inside of a plastic mint box and still have plenty of room for the mints.

Using a simple design the audio enters the device through a electret microphone and hits a transistor for amplification, the signal is then passed to the oscillator section of the circuit which features an LC tank type design which generates the carrier frequency and mixes that with the signal for a range of about 100 feet indoors.

Each section is broken down into steps where it is thoroughly explained with animations, theory, and simulation, if you are wondering how a transistor, wire, and capacitors make an FM transmitter, or if you would like to just make the final project, schematics, pcb files, and assembly instructions are provided as well.

Join us after the break for a short video and be sure to check out the other radio transmitters we have featured as well.

Continue reading “Minty FM Transmitter” →

TV Oscilloscope

March 7, 2011 by Kevin Dady 25 Comments

Need an oscilloscope? Want to see the music? Don’t have money, but do have a old TV? Then this TV to oscilloscope mod may be right up your alley. Now don’t go running off just yet, when you’re working inside of a CRT device you are exposed to mains current, high voltage, and high frequency, so extra care needs to be observed .

If you have your rubber welding gloves, and have discharged all your fat capacitors (including the CRT) its pretty much the same magic trick as couple we have previously featured. Patch an amplified input signal into the vertical deflection coil and let her go, but this instructable features much more detailed instruction, and photos so you have a much better chance of replicating this (not quite lab grade) potentially useful device.

Join us after the break for a short video.

Continue reading “TV Oscilloscope” →

Quick Hack Brings Wi-Fi To An Aging Laptop

March 6, 2011 by Mike Nathan 33 Comments

usb_wifi_adapter

[Jarrod] has an older Compaq laptop he is still pretty keen on, but he has one niggling problem – the laptop doesn’t have a built-in wireless card. He recently changed security protocols on his home wireless network to WPA and realized that his old Linksys PC card only supports WEP. He decided it was time to find another way to connect wirelessly, so he started searching around for options.

It turns out that his laptop does have the ability to accept a LCD-mounted add-on wireless card, but it costs about $100 and doesn’t support WPA. He figured that the card slipped into some sort of glorified USB port, and after disassembling the laptop, he found that he was right.

He quickly soldered a few wires and a USB adapter to the Bluetooth board that already occupied the card slot, then plugged in a wireless mouse to see what would happen. The mouse’s radio powered on without issue, and much to [Jarrod’s] delight, the port was USB 2.0 compatible.

Now that he knows the port is live, he plans on finding a small USB 802.11 G or N adapter to cram into the slot – with the deluge of miniature USB Wi-Fi adapters on the market, that shouldn’t be too hard.

8th ACM Conference On Creativity & Cognition Call For Papers

March 6, 2011 by Mike Nathan 2 Comments

acm_cnc2011

[Jim Davies] from the Association for Computing Machinery wrote us to let us know about a conference being hosted this fall, the 8th ACM conference on Creativity and Cognition. C&C 2011 has a lot to offer, providing an opportunity for artists, scientists, designers and educators to gather together and share their expertise via a series of group meetings, tutorials, and workshops.

We wanted to bring C&C 2001 to the attention of our readers as it is likely many of you had some level of interaction with your college or university’s local ACM chapter in the past. [Jim] wanted to point out that though the conference is slated for the first week of November, there is a deadline of April 25th for all papers and proposals. If you are interested in submitting something to the conference, it would be wise to get started soon.

The overall theme of this year’s conference is Creativity and Technology, which fits the hacking community quite well. Good luck to any of you who decide to give it a shot!

Inkscape Plugin For Engraving Fonts

March 6, 2011 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

[Windell] developed an Inkscape extension called Hershey Text that helps you process fonts into vector representations. If you’ve tried to 3D print, plot, or mill text in the past you may have run across the problem of generating vector paths that deal with the outline and fill of the text appropriately. The problem stems from how fonts are defined; either by the area that they enclose, or by the path that is used to draw the outline. Check out [Windell’s] tutorial for this extension where he explains each of these issues and shows how to overcome them.

The image above illustrates the stroke options, which allow you to vector multiple paths to best fill in the correct parts of each character using path-based hardware. The package includes a wide variety of interesting font sets that are in the public domain, and includes tools such as a glyph map generator that make it very user friendly.

Hackaday Links: March 6, 2011

March 6, 2011 by Mike Szczys 31 Comments

Omnidirectional personal transport

[Dan] sent us a link to this Honda U3-X personal transport device. It’s kind of like a Segway that can move in any direction but our head already hurts from the thought of going over backward on one of these.

How light bulb filaments were developed

Now that incandescent light bulbs are about to be outlawed here in the US, we thought you might enjoy learning how the filaments were developed. This another video by [Bill Hammack], the engineer guy, and we’re big fans of his work.

Wooden stove reflow

Who needs a PID controlled skillet when you can reflow on this wooden stove? Well maybe not reflow, this is more of a salvage operation.

Javascript control

We’ve seen more than enough Arduino controlled outlets. But if you’re interested in using Javascript to control the Arduino this post may be just what you’re looking for.

Sledgehammer keyboard