CES: Where Are They Now? CES Of Course!

January 7, 2011 by 10 Comments

CES is a time for showcasing the latest and greatest innovative products. While the crowd milled around the iLounge there was one company who stood out amongst the rest. [Mike] from CableJive is making his debut on the biggest stage for innovation this year. Many of you will remember [Mike] from a post back in 2006, where he was fed up of with all of the good docks being for the apple products exclusively. He set out to fix this and, when talking with him, attributes his success to the coverage Hack a Day did on his project. CableJive has become so popular that he has hired staff that help him produce his products. All detailed information for their products can be found at their website.  The finished product is displayed after the break.

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Internet Enabled Drip Coffee

January 7, 2011 by 23 Comments

A fresh pot of coffee is never more than a tweet away with the Tweet-a-Pot. It works in much the same way that our Troll Sniffing Rat does. For that build we used a Python script to monitor our comments, and this does the same except that the script read tweets through the Twitter API. It watches for a specific hash tag (#driptwit) and when found it sends a serial command to an Arduino. The microcontroller then writes a digital pin high to actuate a relay, powering up the coffee maker.

Sure, you have to preload the pot with grounds and water, but what do you expect, automatic coffee roasting and brewing? That’s quite a bit more work.

CES: Microsoft Hacks Up Next OS As SOC

January 6, 2011 by 76 Comments

With the Pre-CES Keynote made by [Steve Ballmer], the announcement came that the next iteration of their operating system being available in SOC specific form.  This will lead to windows being able to run a very diverse hardware set in a much more efficient manner than it does right now.  Microsoft displayed 4 different versions of what the next generation prototypes are from 4 different manufacturers but there has been no work done yet on the GUI for SOC as [Ballmer] was very clear to mention that more than a couple of times.  Some photos of the prototypes can be found after the break!

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Drill-based Kinect Camera

January 6, 2011 by 42 Comments

[Brett Graham] and [David Cox] are taking the Kinect out into the world thanks to this handheld hack they call the Drill of Depth. Apparently, the Kinect wants 12V at 1A which is quite easy to provide with a rechargeable power tool like this Ryobi drill. The setup features a 4.3″ touchscreen display, connected to the Gumstix Overo Air that is running Linux. They claim that there’s a “legitimate scientific reason” for building the device but they’re not sharing it yet.

So what would you use this for? We wonder if it would be possible to roll a GPS into the mix, then use post processing from the captured data to recreate the environment in a virtual setting? Imagine if a weekend spent walking around campus and processing the results let you model your University and make it an add-on level for your favorite game. Or perhaps this could be paired with a regular camera to generate high-quality 3D skinning data for Google Earth. That’s what we came up with, what do you think?

Making Punch Card Programming A Snap

January 6, 2011 by 47 Comments

About thirty years ago [H. P. Friedrichs] pulled off a hack that greatly improved the process of programming with punch cards. At the time, his school had just two IBM 029 keypunch machines. One of them is shown in the upper right and it uses a keyboard to choose which parts of each card should be punched out. This was time-consuming, and one misplaced keystroke could ruin the card that you were working on. Since you had to sit at the machine and type in your source code these machines were almost always in use.

But wait, the school acquired a dozen of the TRS-80 computers seen in the lower left. They were meant to be used when teaching BASIC, but [HPF] hatched a plan to put them to task for punch card generation. He built his own interface hardware that connected to the expansion port of the new hardware. Using his custom interface a student could create a virtual card deck that could be rearranged and revised to correct mistakes in the source code. The hardware then allows the virtual deck to be dumped in to the punching machine. This broke the bottleneck caused by students sitting at the punch card terminal.

We think that [HPF] sent in this project after seeing the antiquated hardware from that 1970’s calculator. These hacks of yore are a blast to revisit so don’t be afraid to tip us off if you know of a juicy one.

Kitchen Island Makes A Mean Cocktail

January 6, 2011 by 20 Comments

[John Creswell] built a heck of an automatic bartender in a kitchen island. The image on the left shows a top-down view of the inside of the cabinet. There’s a mini-fridge where the liquids are stored, and around the perimeter of the cabinet [John] mounted sixteen pumps to get the beverage up into your cup. Drinks are dispensed from the lighted serving fixture on the right by selecting your preferred cocktail from a computerized menu. According to his writeup the project was finished about five years ago, making us wonder if he’s tackled any upgrades such as adding support for smartphones.

[Thanks Zack]

Quiet Dust Extractor From Scavenged Materials

January 5, 2011 by 11 Comments

As with many of the projects covered on hackaday, [bongodrummer]’s Dust Sniper came about because of a lack of effective commercial solutions, in this case to the problem of quiet dust extraction.

Workshops are generally full of dust and noise, both of which take their toll on the human body. This is why safety regulations exist for noisy and dusty workplaces and–as [bongodrummer] rightly points out–we have to take precautions in our own home and community workshops. Hearing protectors, dust masks and safety goggles are integral, but reducing the amount of dust and noise in the fist place is paramount.

Using mostly scavenged materials [bongodrummer] did a quality job building the Dust Sniper–and all for a bill of materials totaling £20. It has an integrated work surface, automatic switches on 2 vacuum lines to sync up with power tools, a cyclonic air filter that prevents clogging the HEPA filter and reducing suction power, inlet and outlet soundproofing, and a plain old power outlet for good measure.

Whether or not you’re interested in building an integrated workbench/extractor system like this one, we recommend you check out the details of the cyclone filter and the sound reducing components. Not only are they an interesting read, but they could be useful to apply in other projects, for example a soldering station with fume hood.

We think it would be really neat to include more cyclones in our projects. Stick around after the break to see [bongodrummer]’s prototype cyclone filter in action.

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