[eric] has found that he can build a pretty nice 2 axis joystick out of some VCR parts. Specifically, he’s using the idler wheel. When you disassemble the idler wheel, you’ll find that it has a bevelled washer in the perfect location to help with smooth joystick operation. Add a spring and a hole in some wood and you’ve got the basics. All you need to add now are the switches. This is a fantastic example of recycling parts, you never would have guessed that it was made from trash.
[Alex] sent us this project he’s working on where he’s building a phototransistor based multitouch input system. Though many people have built systems with phototransistors, most of them are quite large and very sensitive light and dark variances. [Alex] has done some fancy background subtraction through software. He believes his is the first to do this. As you can see in the video after the break, it seems impervious to the lamp he is moving around, and still fairly sensitive to his hand. We’re curious to see where he takes this one.
Look at this awesome glove. This awesome glove is used to control tetris. Yes, you read that right, it controls tetris. This was a final project at Cornell in the summer of 2008. They built this glove to do gesture controlled tetris. With all the announcements of the PS3 motion device and Microsoft’s project Natal, it’s nice to look back to our very recent past and see some alternative user input. These people are using accellerometer data only, sent to the computer wirelessly.
[Matt] wrote in to tell us about this project. He plans on travelling with his MSI Wind and wanted better audio recording capabilities. He decided to install an additional microphone and a preamp. He made a custom preamp and wired it directly to the motherboard. The microphone was then mounted in the laptop screen. The second microphone is placed opposite of the first, about 18cm apart which [Matt] claims gives it a binaural effect. We think that this might just classify as stereo though. Wouldn’t you have to seperate them with a barrier or dampening device for binaural? It doesn’t really matter though, stereo mics are a great addition to the MSI Wind, and he did it very well. He does point out that it picks up a lot of noise though. There’s always room for improvement.
Like many pet owners, [Pete] was curious about his little furry friend’s habits while he was gone. He decided to build an RFID tracking system to monitor their positions. This data would then be available on the web. An Arduino handles the communication of the data, both to twitter and his personal cat tracking site. We were a bit surprised to see that the only data transmitted on the final project was whether the cat was inside or out. We’d like to see a heat map of the cat’s activity in the house.
[John] sent us this nice little project. He shows us how to create a motion activated alarm that plays the Mario Brothers theme and flashes some lights. He’s using an ATTiny13a for the brains, and a cool mario mushroom candy tin for the body. You can see it in action after the break.
[Florin] was given the task of repairing a GPS unit that wouldn’t boot up. What he found was unfortunately a bad processor. Fortunately, he was able to make a project out of it. After scavenging the good bits, the GPS module and the LCD, he set about making it a USB device. He now has an EEEpc with GPS.
