Hackit: Community Hacking Project?

January 27, 2008 by 154 Comments


By popular request, I’ve added a hackit category. Today’s hackit is one of my coffee shop creations. Considering the quality of work we’ve seen, I can’t help but wonder… If the Hack-A-Day community were to come together and produce a joint collaborative hardware project, what could it build? A modular robotics platform? A digital I/O platform for other projects? If you could harness the power of thousands of hardware hacking geeks, what would you ask them to do?

Got a better idea? Let’s hear it.

RGB PIC Color Changer

January 26, 2008 by 8 Comments


[Ian] put up his RGB LED color changer project over at diylife. It’s a pretty simple project, but well designed and flexible for combining with other projects. He used a PIC18F2550 to drive everything, and some FETs to drive the LEDs. When you connect a USB cable, the color cycling project stops and the PIC responds to simple hex based color commands.

Cesar: Geek Out Your Powerwheels

January 25, 2008 by 8 Comments


[Zack Anderson] built this computer controlled autonomous robot (back in 2003) out of an old, ugly powerwheels Jeep. It’s got a full onboard computer with wifi, video camera, SONAR sensors, a robotic arm and it can self-navigate. He’s provided server and client code (I haven’t tried it yet), and The project shouldn’t be a surprise, since he’s been working on entries for the DARPA challenge for a while.

Make Your Own Roll Up Keyboard

January 24, 2008 by 13 Comments


[Auger] sent in this nice little hack. The instructable says to get a USB keyboard (it looks like a Dell USB keyboard to me), gut it and label the flexible membranes inside after you join them together. If you’ve got a supply of this style of keyboard, it could be a cheap source… or better yet, maybe you can use the guts to produce high quality custom keybads.

Another High Altitude Project

January 22, 2008 by 13 Comments


[Jock] sent in HALO, a nice diy high altitude recon project. Taking a page from the Kite Arial Photography guys, they mounted the camera on a servo tilt mechanism, had radio modem control and SMS gps position updates. I’m waiting for someone to put together a similar package that glides back to home base after the balloon is released.

By the way, if you’ve got a newer CRT RPTV, you might be interested how I fixed mine.