Looping Foot Pedal

February 23, 2010 by Mike Szczys 23 Comments

This guitar pedal can record, playback, and modify samples. [Colin Merkel], also know for his work on electronic door locks, built this to replicate some guitar effects he heard in recordings. By tapping the button at the bottom with your foot the device begins recording. Another tap stops the recording and starts the loop. That’s where the rest of the controls take over, with settings to adjust the speed of playback, volume, and the type of playback looping. The video after the break gives a great demonstration of these features.

[Colin] built this around a PIC 18F877A with a 256k RAM chip to store the sample. There’s a bunch of other components that go into this and we’re dumbfounded that he built it on protoboard. This would be a multi-breadboard prototype for us and we wouldn’t think twice about laying out and etching our own PCB. He admits that the point-to-point soldering stretched his skills to the limit but he doesn’t say how many hours it took to get the circuit up and running. This is a great addition to the cool guitar pedals we’ve seen here.

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DIY Aluminum Heat Sink Casting

February 23, 2010 by Mike Szczys 43 Comments

[Peter Wirasnik] has been casting his own aluminum heat sinks. He’s working on capturing the heat from a car’s exhaust system and turning it into electricity, kind of like the candle generator. In the photo above a standard heat sink is bolted to one side of a Peltier cooler with [Peter’s] own casting on the bottom. That casting will connect to the exhaust pipe and transfer heat to the Peltier while the other heat sink keeps the opposite side relatively cool. What results is a voltage between 600mV and 1V.

We’re not quite sure what the end product will be but the casting process is fascinating. He carves the shape of the piece he wants to cast from Styrofoam and embeds it in a box of sand. He then melts salvaged aluminum in a cast iron frying pan using what looks like a propane torch. Once molten, he pours the aluminum into the mold and it burns away the Styrofoam as it fills the void. A little cleanup and he’s got the heat conductive mounting bracket he was after.

Steorn Orbo Motor Replica

February 21, 2010 by Mike Szczys 178 Comments

Reader [Hjhndr] ran across an interesting set of tests and wanted to know if they’re brilliant or just a load of bull. We’re not making the call on that, but the tests on a Steorn Orb motor replica are worth looking at.Keep in mind, people used to think the earth was flat and scientists of the time would have sworn up and down that’s the way things were.

The Steorn Orbo is a motor that generates more power than is put into it. At least according to Steorn Limited that’s what it does. An independent panel of scientists said otherwise a few years back but that didn’t stop the company from showing off the concept a few more times, most recently a showing in Dublin ended this month.

So anyway, [Jean-Louis Naudin] took what he saw from those demonstrations and built a replica. He’s made several papers about the principle as well as his testing available online. There’s a lot of math, a little bit of smoke and mirrors, and several videos. Take a look and let us know what you think in the comments.

Spectrum Analyzer Wedged Into A Cellphone

February 12, 2010 by Mike Szczys 21 Comments

[Miguel A. Vallejo] wanted a portable spectrum analyzer for the 2.4GHz ISM band. No problem, there’s modules for that are easy to interface with a microcontroller and LCD screen. But carrying around a black project box doesn’t exactly scream ‘cool’ so he fit his spectrum analyzer inside of a cell phone. This made a lot of things easier for him; he already had a few old phones, he was able to use both the original battery and the original LCD screen, and a lot of the mounting work is already done for you. The only challenge was to fit his custom circuitry inside. By hacking off part of the CYWM6935 module and cutting some protoboard in the same shape as the original PCB he managed to get everything into this tiny portable package. Now he’s looking for a way to incorporate a charger, and an on/off switch.

If you don’t have an old cell phone sitting around you can try building a spectrum analyzer that uses a character display. But we’d suggest hitting up your friends for their old cellphones. The screens are used in all kinds of fun projects.

Teletype Machine From An Electric Typewriter

February 11, 2010 by Mike Szczys 34 Comments

This project, by an unknown hacker, patches into an electric typewriter and uses it as a Teletype. An AVR ATmega168 microcontroller patches into the key matrix of the typewriter which allows it to artificially type. Now, data can be sent over a serial connection to the AVR for output on the typewriter.

We’re not quite sure what this is going to be used for. We’ve seen hacks like this for Twitter reading in the past but he makes no mention of that type of use. Personally, we’d like to have this just to “print” out the occasional letter. Typewriters are so rarely used these days it would be a bit peculiar to get a letter that has the dimpled impressions associated with slamming a die into a piece of paper.

HUD For Real Life Capture-the-flag

February 11, 2010 by Mike Szczys 27 Comments

If you’ve played any of the Splinter Cell games you’ll remember the PDA that [Sam Fisher] carried around with him. What if you could have one of your own when playing capture-the-flag? [Brad] has created the ZephyrEye as an electronic command and communications device for real-life games.

Each player carries around their own unit. The ZephyrEye has a GPS module, Xbee module, LCD screen, and control buttons. This allows a player to setup one of several different games, map out the game field including base locations and flag locations, and monitor a time limit and scoring. Other players can join the game in progress. The best part? The GPS modules report tracking to each handheld and act as radar for your team and the enemy team. We’ve got a couple of demo videos after the break.

Words can’t describe how delighted this would have made us back in the day. We don’t play outside with the other neighborhood kids anymore (insert dirty-old-man joke here) but that might change just because of this device. We may end up joining [Barney Stinson] for some amazingly awesome laser-tag games after all.

[Brad’s] posted hardware information and source code so that you can use to throw together a dozen or so units. We think the next version should incorporate a wearable display.

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‘tiny’ Power Supply Monitor

February 9, 2010 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

[Manekinen] built a power supply monitor based around an AVR ATtiny13. Voltage and amperage are displayed on a 16×2 LCD character display (we’re not sure what the third number is… samples per second?). This is no small feat considering that the tiny13 is an 8-pin chip. He makes it happen by using the pins for both LCD control and ADC input. To make this happen the HD44780 compliant display is used in 4-bit mode. Check out the video after the break and hit up the non-translated page if you want to download the source code and PCB artwork. A note of warning, he’s using the RESET pin for I/O which means once you burn the fuses you’ll need a programmer that has High Voltage Serial Programming capabilities if you want to reprogram the chip. Continue reading “‘tiny’ Power Supply Monitor” →