Building The Yellow Submarine

February 23, 2010 by 19 Comments

Submarine builds are always fun but frequently produce headaches when it comes to keeping the water out. [Jason Rollette] built this ROV to explore a shipwreck in Lake Michigan. The main structure is PVC and various bilge pumps are used for propulsion. An AVR ATmega32 controls the on board electronics with an Ethernet tether to the surface. He’s even got a visual basic program that displays system information and a video feed. It may not be as stylish as the last submarine we saw but it’s amazingly well thought out and well built.

[Thanks Daphreak]

Is That Some Type Of New Kindle?

February 22, 2010 by 42 Comments

[Mr C Camacho] picked up an inexpensive digital picture frame hoping to hack into it. He hasn’t had the time to crack open the hardware so that it will do his bidding but he did find a creative way to make it an ebook reader. Using a python script he processes books, creating images of the pages.

The python script, available after the break, takes free books from Project Gutenburg and spits out JPG images. Page turning and bookmarking are not what they ought to be but the process does work. The thought of someone staring at a picture frame on the subway is a bit amusing but we’re sure that sooner or later someone will ask if it’s a new version of the Kindle.

Continue reading “Is That Some Type Of New Kindle?” →

Gentle Wake Up Alarm

February 22, 2010 by 37 Comments

[Michiel], unsatisfied by his Phillips wake up light, decided just to make his own. He really wanted programmable weekend alarms as well as an easier to find snooze button. At first, his circuit was not reliable enough, losing several minutes per hour, but he gutted another alarm for the 1Hz crystal. After some carpentry, his final alarm ended up quite nice.  After so many aggressive alarm clocks, it’s nice to see that not everyone needs to be assaulted out of bed.

Correction: apparently, there’s no 1Hz crystal. That was a guess on my part. -[Caleb]

[via Hacked Gadgets]

PIC Pong Clock

February 22, 2010 by 12 Comments

[Andrew] built this pong clock over the span of a couple of days. The PIC 18f2520 he used can serve as a real time clock with the addition of an external clock crystal. His project proves the usefulness of an oscilloscope as poor board layout caused interference in the crystal connections, something difficult to troubleshoot without this handy lab tool.

Pong clocks have been quite popular. This one is nice because it’s easy to throw together now that [Andrew’s] done the coding work for you. Written in assembly, reading and understanding his code might be a good exercise if your low-level language skills are lacking.

Android 2.1 On Four More HTC Handsets

February 21, 2010 by 14 Comments

Tired of fighting Windows mobile on your HTC handset? Now you can fight a beta ROM of Android 2.1. [Slm4996] has put in a flurry of work over the last few days to get Android 2.1 running on the HTC Kaiser (aka AT&T tilt), Vogue, Niki, and Polaris. Right now everything except the camera and bluetooth is working but there is a bug tracker to help with troubleshooting any undiscovered issues. If you want to try it out but don’t want to flash the hacked ROM to your phone you can run it beside Windows Mobile by using HaRET.

Correction: The title of this post originally read “Droid 2.1” in error. We have corrected it to read “Android 2.1”.  [Thanks GuyFrom7Up]

Robocup Bot Places Wheels Perpendicularly

February 21, 2010 by 17 Comments

[Eric] built this robot for the 2009 Robocup Jr. competition. The game ball has IR LEDs inside of it and this little bot uses eight IR detectors for tracking. Four motors mounted perpendicular to each other provide locomotion. Since this would normally have you traveling in circles, he used some omnidirectional wheels walled Transwheels. As you can see, they have small rollers built-in and allow movement in any direction if the motors work together. A couple of L298 controller chips handle the motors. [Eric] wrote a program to calculate the PWM necessary to drive the controllers and to coordinate movement of the wheels.

Don’t miss the demo videos after the break and, if you’re not a fan of wheels, stop by and see the bi-pedal soccer robots. Continue reading “Robocup Bot Places Wheels Perpendicularly” →

Hackaday Links: February 21 2010

February 21, 2010 by 13 Comments

Powerplant control room panoramas:

There are two power plants presented in 360 degree panoramas here. All those dials and switches just get us giddy. The one pictured above was built in 1918 and is still in operation. Not only are the control rooms here, but several other locations around the facility too.

Energy recycling prosthetic foot:

At first, we thought that this energy recycling prosthetic foot was going to be a power generating device to harvest some energy using our weight in the heel compression. Actually, it is showing off a fancy micro controller based system for reproducing our naturally springy step.

Translating in real time with google:

Google is working on a system to do real time translation of text on your phone. It is integrated into the “google goggles” software which allows you to search the internet using images from your phone. This is pretty cool, but with google translate and OCR being readily available for quite some time now, we have to wonder; why didn’t we think of that?

Exploded images of everyday objects:

[Adam Voorhes] has put together a small collection of exploded views of everyday objects. While they aren’t laid out great for reference, they look good and might make nice artwork in your workshop.