Touch Screen For Graphing Calculator

April 3, 2010 by Mike Szczys 26 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyWIJFLbJZ0]

[Owen] got down and dirty by adding a touchscreen to his TI-84 graphing calculator. The dirty part is the z80 assembly code he wrote to use the linkport as a UART (assembly always makes us feel queasy). Once that was working he implemented some commands using an Arduino and then hooked up an Nintendo DS touch screen. Now he’s got this proof of concept video where he draws on the screen, that input is interpreted by the Arduino, commands are sent through the UART, and the calculator program draws on the screen. Adding a touch screen to something is a lot more impressive when you have to go to these lengths to get it working. Nice job!

Illuminated Moveable Type

April 2, 2010 by Mike Szczys 30 Comments

[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/10437744]

[Rob Stewart] put in a lot of time and built this lighted display at great expense. It displays four letter words using a word association algorithm to pick the next term to show. What interests us is the motorized display. It is made up of fluorescent tubes but they’re not fixed in place. Each can be rotated, as well as moved along a linear path to form any letter in the alphabet. Check out [Rob’s] build logs for the details on how he pulled it all together.

[Thanks Hugo via Engadget and Switched]

Flood Triggered Camera

April 2, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 12 Comments

When the Department of Natural Resources of Australia decided that they needed to capture data about the natural flooding of a cave, they turned to a hacker to get results. The goal was to photograph the area during these floods with an automated system. In the end, they used a gutted Lumix digital camera mounted in a trash can, covered in aluminium foil. Though it sounds a bit silly, the final product turned out quite nice. You can see the build log, schematics, and results on the project page.

[via hackedgadgets]

Update: 50MHz To 100Mhz Scope Conversion

March 31, 2010 by Mike Szczys 59 Comments

Changing this 50MHz Rigol oscilloscope into its larger, more expensive brother just became quite a bit easier. When we originally looked at this hack it required pulling some capacitors off of the board. Now all it takes is three commands over a serial terminal connection.

Take a look at the walk through video after the break. You’ll see that there’s one chip that needs to be setup differently to change the functionality. Removing capacitors was actually changing the commands sent to initialize that chip at power-up. Now you can just change the model number and one letter of the serial number via a terminal and the firmware will recognize this as the more expensive DS1102E.

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Swapping Coins Cells For Capacitors For Noise Filtering

March 27, 2010 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

Here’s an interesting idea: replace a disposable coin cell battery with a capacitor in order to filter the noise from an external power supply. [David Cook] is taking advantage of the falling costs of digital calipers. He’s mounted one on his milling machine but noticed that with an external power supply the readings would sometimes reset in the middle of his work. The LR44 cell he’s replacing makes for very difficult in-place soldering so instead of permanently replacing it he built an insert that matched the form factor. The outer ring is from a piece of copper tubing and soldered to a PCB that he etched.

If [David’s] name sounds familiar it’s because we featured his Happy Meal toy scavenging a while back.

[Thanks Thomas]

Turing Machine A Masterpiece Of Craftsmanship

March 27, 2010 by Mike Szczys 33 Comments

Everything about this Turing machine is absolutely brilliant. A Turing machine uses a strip of material to record, calculate, and change data. [Mike Davey] built this one using servo motors, a Parallax Propeller, felt-tipped pen, and 1000 feet of film leader. The machine writes characters to the leader, reads them using a grayscale camera, and erases them with a rotating felt cylinder.

Watch the video after the break, it covers every one of the intricate details that add up to [Mike’s] perfect build. We loved his Nickel-O-Matic but he really outdid himself with this one. With our mouths still agape we’re going back for our fifth viewing.

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8-bit Game Console With Wireless Motion Controller

March 26, 2010 by Mike Szczys 24 Comments

[Luis Cruz] built a gaming console with motion control. The circuit above connects via composite video to a television and communicates with a wireless controller. The controller is on a smaller breadboard which includes an accelerometer for the input and the infrared circuitry necessary for wireless data transmission back to the home system. Take a look at the first game he developed for it in the video after the break. There’s some details available (ie: he’s using ATmega168 and ATmega328 chips) but we’ve asked him to post code and schematics which he is currently cleaning up for mass consumption.

Ah, the 8-bit sound in that game takes us back to the glory days of Atari and Intellivision.

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