Pong Clock

September 14, 2008 by Eliot 5 Comments

[funnypolynomial] saw this Pong clock years ago and had been planning on building his own version. With a move looming he decided it was finally time to finish up his Pong clock since completed projects take far less room than incomplete ones. The core of the system is a ThinkPad. He separated the hinge and bolted the keyboard to the back of the screen. The display ribbon was long enough, but he had to extend the wires for the backlight. The power button was also extended and the battery removed. The software is a Windows screen saver that uses the two mouse buttons for navigation similar to how you set a two button watch. Every minute the the left player misses the ball and the right player’s score increases. You can see a video of the clock below. In the past, he also turned a digital multimeter into a clock. Continue reading “Pong Clock” →

Xbox 360 Wireless Visual Interface

September 13, 2008 by Eliot 8 Comments

[jon barber] pointed out another great project on the benheck forums that hasn’t gotten much attention. [techknott] built a wireless video interface for his Xbox 360. Think of it as a sort of video game thin client. It has the form-factor of a portable but doesn’t include the 360’s components. Instead it has a 1.2GHz A/V receiver and the guts of a wireless controller. The specific transmitter was chosen because it wouldn’t interfere with the 2.4GHz controller. The power supply is two 2600mAh batteries running at 7.5V with a built in charging circuit. The draw from the screen is ~500mA. The entire unit is 1 inch thick.

Playstation 3 Boomerang Controller

September 12, 2008 by Eliot 11 Comments

Reader [HotDog-Cart] is an active member of the benheck forums and recently completed this Playstation 3 boomerang controller. The boomerang was originally shown with the Playstation 3 prototype and was severely panned by the press. [Josh] started with a cheap 3rd party controller that was approximately boomerang shaped. He enlarged the controller body ~20% using bondo. The internals were replaced with gear from an official Sony controller. It was finished with a coat of black paint. It’s definitely a nice build and the new internals mean it probably feels as good as any factory controller.

Hack A Day 2: Electric Boogaloo

September 11, 2008 by Eliot 20 Comments

Well, that was fun… no, not really, but we’re back from the dead like Steve Jobs. We’ve been getting DDoS’d since essentially the first day we originally came back. After killing a 1G connection, we decided to find a different solution. Since the world didn’t end this week, we brought the site back using WordPress.com as the new host. We now return to our regular blog shenanigans. Here’s to another four years of beta!

3D Mineral Printer

September 7, 2008 by Eliot 1 Comment

The last few days many people have been talking about the USC’s contour printer. It’s a device that prints concrete outlines with the hopes of eventually printing entire houses. Caterpillar has decided to back the initiative.

It reminded us of a project we came across at Maker Faire. [Leif Ames], [Matthew Bowman], [Marides Athanasiadis], and [Terrell Edwards] built a 3D Mineral Printer as their senior engineering design project at UC Santa Cruz. The printer works by first laying down a layer of dry concrete powder. It then selectively wets the powder where it wants a solid form. The reaction doesn’t require air to dry, so the next layer can be applied immediately. The printer only creates contours and the team imagines this being used to create temporary casting molds. The build envelop is nearly a cubic meter. When we talked to them, they were experimenting with many different types of material mixes. A video of the first test is after the break. Continue reading “3D Mineral Printer” →

LCD PIC Graphics Demo

September 5, 2008 by Eliot 2 Comments

[conville] has been pushing standard HD44780 character displays to the limit. Embedded above is an example spectrum analyzer and text scrolling demo. Below you’ll find a scope demo. Both of these are created using a PIC 16F688 that dynamically rewrites a custom character set to create the animation. You can find the source code on mikrocontroller.net. Continue reading “LCD PIC Graphics Demo” →

Regenerative Bike Brakes

September 4, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 21 Comments

For their senior design project at Arizona State University, these guys built a regenerative braking system for their bike. As they brake, the system spools up to give them a push back up to speed. They achieved 25% efficiency on one run, which isn’t too shabby.

The site has all kinds of information. You can check out their different plans and ideas from before they decided on this specific layout as well as all their data from the test runs. Be sure to look at the piece by piece breakdown of what changes were made from the initial design.

[thanks Mario Gomes]