classic hacks

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Phototransistor Multitouch With A Twist

June 4, 2009 by 9 Comments

multitouch

[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.

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Gesture Controlled Tetris

June 3, 2009 by 21 Comments

glove

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.

Stereo Microphones In An MSI Wind

June 1, 2009 by 14 Comments

binaurial

[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.

CATaLOG: RFID Cat Tracking

May 27, 2009 by 21 Comments

rfidcats

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.

Weather Canvas

May 22, 2009 by 7 Comments

weather

Another Cornell final project, Weather Canvas aims to make watching the weather a little more pleasant. Data is captured via a thermometer, humidity sensor, anemometer, and a Hotwheels radar gun turned precipitation sensor. Once it’s captured, it’s transmitted to the LED matrix inside which displays pretty patterns to convey the weather conditions. They have set images, like icons, that mean different things.