This isn’t a specific project, so much as a pointer to a budding new site. Puppet Circuits is the project of [Raphael Abrams], one of the co founders of NYC Resistor. As you can probably guess, he has been posting about the circuits he uses in his animatronic puppets. I faces all kinds of problems since may of the systems are to be worn and have to endure some pretty rough treatment and still perform well. Very interesting stuff to read about.
[andrew_h] has put together this slick anti theft device for his car. The RFID immobiliser is used to keep the car from starting unless you swipe an RFID tag. Depending on how well you hide it, and how well the person stealing the car knows you, they would have no reason to suspect that they have to swipe the tag. Even if someone steals the car while it is already running, they won’t be able to re start the engine if they shut it off. As usual, schematics and PCBs are available.
[Sprite_tm] dusted off his assembly skills and managed to emulate a Z80 computer using an AVR ATmega88. He’s using an SD card in place of the floppy and a 128 KB DRAM chip to handle the memory for the emulated machine. An FT232 board gives him terminal access which he uses for input and display. As you can see, the hardware is much simpler than building the original would have been. He makes up for this with complicated firmware. In the end, the emulated core occupies about 2 KB of programming space after he followed the Z80 Propeller project’s idea of dividing the instructions into different modules and using a lookup table to access them.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7AfiCQQ4nE]
The MIDI piano instructor is a tool aimed at those who wish to learn to play piano, but don’t want to take lessons. The LED bar mounted above the keys lights up to show you exactly what key to press and when. We’ve seen this available in some electronic keyboards for some time, but this unit would be able to fit any standard sized keyboard. Check the page for schematics and pictures.
[via Flickr]
[Muris] is back with another infrared controlled lighting hack. When we checked in with him last year he was showing off an IR controlled dimmer module. Now he’s back with this device that is CFL friendly. Because standard CFL bulbs are not dimmer compatible he’s adapted the project away from dimming and toward switching. The new design still uses an infrared remote but now it can turn two devices on and off again or toggle between them. Our favorite part of the build is that the PIC based device can learn the codes of whichever remote you choose, rather than having to rely on one specific type of remote.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO2-tqoyGik]
Take a few moments and watch this 3 axis rotating LED light display fire up. The final effect of being an RGB glowing ball is nice, but we’re fascinated with the structure. There are tons of great detailed pictures of the assembly on the forum thread to feast your eyes on. Just getting power to the LEDs was a feat, he passes their power through 6 slip contacts. Parts were pulled from an old VCR and some old fans.
[via HackedGadgets]
A hand input bootloader and a custom communications protocol are what bring the Apple IIe Twitter ticker to life. [Chris Yerga] bought the decades-old machine for $20 at a flea market. Having just completed his TweetWall he decided to adapt the idea for the 1 MHz machine. He manually input a 50 byte bootloader that would let him dump programs into memory via the joystick port. From there he rigged up a connection with a USB FTDI cable. Now the images and text are processed by a modern-day machine and fed to the Apple IIe at 3600 baud. See this in action after the break.
