Macro Photography With CHDK

March 27, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 17 Comments

macro

[Tim] photographs insects for bugguide.net. As you can imagine, macro photography is a must. He was very frustrated with his camera’s stock ability to capture the insects. You can see in the example on his site that the image is blurry and has some color issues. He did some research and hacked together a method of getting fantastic macro images for relatively cheap. He used the reversed lens method to get his macro lens set up. He then modded his camera with CHDK for more control. He found that his focal distance was too small to get the entire bug in focus, so he took 15 images at different distances and combined them to make the final image. We’re curious how the pringles can macro lens would compare to this. Thanks for the submission [sp’ange]. Lets see some more tips.

Distance Detecting Pc

March 26, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 55 Comments

distance

Reader [Joshua] sent in his latest project. using a sonar rangefinder, an Arduino, and some clever programming, he’s made is computer react to his distance from it. As you can see in the video after the jump, he has programmed it to change text size and background color depending on his distance from the screen. While he admits that his implementation doesn’t seem immediately useful, there’s lots of potential there. We can actually think of several uses. What would you use it for?

Nickel-O-Matic

March 24, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 19 Comments

coins

[Mike] sent in this project. It’s a robot, designed to print on wooden coins while people watch. It was built to be in the iHobby Expo 08 in Chicago. The main movement is controlled by a BASIC Stamp2, while the ink jet system is run off of a Propeller. The entire system has 4 servos, 3 stepper motors, a DC motor, a hacked breast pump, an ink jet head, and 5 IR sensors. in case you missed that, it has a breast pump. We’re assuming that’s the part that picks up the wooden nickels with suction. He states that the project was meant to be entertaining, so there are lots of superfluous and inefficient actions as you can see in the video after the break. Great job [Mike].

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Brew Fridge Thermostat

March 22, 2009 by Eliot 32 Comments

thermostat-1

Reader [Will R] sent in a thermostat mod for his brew fridge. His friends had found a perfectly fine bar refrigerator and wanted to repurpose it for brewing beer. A previous batch of microbrew had been mangled by the Australian heat so they wanted something that could maintain the perfect temperature. The fridge’s built-in thermostat wouldn’t rise above 5 degrees so they had to build their own. [Will] used a 10K NTC thermistor to measure the temperature. It’s connected to an ATtiny25 microcontroller that does the comparison and determines whether to turn on the compressor. He referenced SparkFun’s relay tutorial for the switching side. Although he didn’t etch a board for this project, the design file is included along with all the code on the project site.

64pixels Are Enough

March 21, 2009 by Eliot 7 Comments

64pixel

[Alex] put together this lovely minimal LED project. The square pixel matrix is soldered directly to the microcontroller in the same style as EMSL’s Micro-Readerboard. During the prototyping phase he used resistors to limit the current from the programming board. The final product doesn’t use resistors and manages the current draw by only turning on a single pixel line at a time. The illustrated assembly guide is very thorough and should help your create an equally compact device. Check out a video of it in motion below.

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Making A Rail Gun

March 20, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 17 Comments

rail

[Rp181] has documented his entire rail gun build. He takes us through collecting the materials and assembling the system. It required 18 400V 3900uf capacitors to get the 5600 joules he wanted. It looks pretty impressive, though a video of it wreaking havoc on something might have been nice. We’ve seen rail guns before, from tiny ones for a robosapien to larger projects very similar to this one. In his instructable, he touts this as a “green” system. The capacitors are aluminum and no gun powder is required to move the projectile. Anyone want to do the math to figure out if it really is any better? Maybe if he’s collecting his energy via a giant solar panel.

[via instructables]

USB Sniffing In Linux

March 19, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 16 Comments

sniffer

[Robert] sent in this tutorial on how to set up USB sniffing in linux. Useful for seeing exactly what is being communicated to and from your USB devices, this ability is built into linux. [Bert], the author, shows us the steps involved and how to filter it to get the data we desire. You can specify exactly which device to capture data from. His example, shown above, is a session with an Arduino.