DC Entries: Almost Done

February 26, 2007 by 6 Comments


We finally came to a decision about the winner of the Design Challenge! (But I’m not telling you until Friday.) Before the winner is announced, there are some more entries that deserve attention.

First, there’s [Henk]’s g-force meter. It’s based on an ATiny26 micro-controller, 30 LEDs to display the force and the ADXL103 accelerometer.

There’s an adaptation of the no parts pic programmer, by [Patrick].

[Evan] sent in his PIC prototyping board using the monster PIC18F4550.

I’ll have one more batch of entries later this week, and the winner will be announced on Friday. Yes really. I’m going to give it a few days just to make sure that all of our DNS issues have cleared up.

Robotic Beer Launching Fridge

February 26, 2007 by 13 Comments

This robotic beer launching fridge is one of those ultimate projects that you are guaranteed to see posted all over the internet today. Robots, beer, the possibility of maiming innocent bystanders… what’s not to love? I’d be lying if I said my mechanical engineering friends and I weren’t contemplating this at many points during college. Kudos to John W. Cornwell of Duke for actually pulling it off. The mini-fridge has three servos: one to elevate beer from the 10 can magazine, one to rotate the turntable, and one for cocking. Spring power is used to catapult the beer across the room. The brains of the system is an ATMega8535 and 3 intelligent H-bridges. It’s controlled by an adapted key-less entry system. It looks like they’ve wisely placed it pointing away from the tv, but I don’t know if referring to your apartment as the “man-pit” is nearly as smart. Check out some of John’s other projects: the Mentos booby-trap and the touch activated paintball gun.

[via Dirk]

DIY Fiber Backlit Keyboard

February 24, 2007 by 11 Comments


In honor of the 17 inch aircraft carrier of a laptop I ordered, I started looking for a backlit keyboard mod that might come close to the one on my powerbook. I found this mod that used fiber optic cable, a single 10,000mcd white LED, some epoxy and simple current regulation to light it up. The original write up is here, and a great looking blue version as well. I’d like to see it this with a control circuit like this one.

Tinmith Augmented Reality Backpack

February 22, 2007 by 8 Comments


I haven’t seen an augmented reality setup in a while. The Tinmith backpack consists of a VR helmet, with helmet mounted GPS tracking, firewire video camera, orientation tracking, glove based user interface and a belt back that contains the mobile computer and batteries. These systems have very interesting applications. From navigation to correcting information in real time to work around partial blindness.

Printer Networked Light Control

February 21, 2007 by 9 Comments


[Andy] sent in his ‘Network Something‘ hack. For his proof of concept, he used a parallel port printer network adapter to create a set of network controllable LEDs. The virtual printer was implemented with a set of shift registers and a set of nand gates. (and a power regulator). Old print servers can be had pretty cheap – my HP $8 on ebay. Definitely an interesting way to get inexpensive network control of your projects.

Note: We’ll be making some server changes today and tomorrow, so comments will be offline for a bit. They’ll be back.