Lazy Knitting

December 15, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 19 Comments

yarn

As much as we love crazy prototype style hacks, we really enjoy seeing things that get used after their creation. [Marcus] sent us the information about his automatic yarn winder. Noticing that his friends who knit had to go through the monotonous process of winding a ball of yarn each time they started the process, he sprung into action. After finding only a few commercial solutions, which were out of his price range, he decided to build his own. He found a hand cranked version and gutted it to add a motor. Now, they simply need to get it started and walk away. Great job [Marcus].

High Speed Photography

December 14, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 12 Comments

high_speed

[Shakir] sent us this fairly easy way to do high speed photography. The idea is to use a microphone to detect a sharp sound on a surface and trigger the flash. The camera is set up with a long exposure to capture the action. Assuming your room is dark enough, you shouldn’t get much ghosting in your exposure. The circuit is a two stage amplifier that engages the flash using a silicon controlled rectifier. Be sure to check out the photos, some are pretty stunning.

Cordless Drill Overhaul

December 13, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 15 Comments

drill_upgrade

[Alexander.m] shows us how to do a major overhaul on a cordless drill, replacing pretty much everything but the case. He needed some more power, but found the price tag of the bigger drills to be prohibitive. He opted for a more hacked together approach and used a 24 volt 1.4 hp hobby motor as a drive. He had to make a custom enclosure for the batteries too. The final result may not be the prettiest thing in the world, with that giant battery pack on the bottom, but it probably gets the job done pretty well and cost less than half of what a new one would have.

Disposable Camera Nixie Tube Driver

December 12, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 10 Comments

nixie_camera

Disposable cameras are quite cheap, and include circuitry that produces very high voltages. Because of this, they have been harvested for many projects. We’ve seen them used for coil guns and large high voltage power supplies, even for fixing rechargeable batteries that won’t charge. The latest in the long list of uses is to create nixie tube drivers. [the_don125] shows us how to use a single disposable camera to power 2 to 3 medium sized Nixie tubes. Be careful, as we said before, this project deals with high voltage.

Making A Cold Heat Soldering Iron

December 11, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 27 Comments

cold_heat

Cold Heat soldering irons are pretty cool. They heat up in seconds and cool down just as quickly. [photozz] shows us how we can make one from stuff we probably have sitting around right now. Cold Heat soldering irons work off of resistance, the tip material heats very quickly when electricity is passed through the two halves. Upon assessing what he had lying around, [photozz] realized that graphite would work much the same way. He modified a regular soldering iron with a new two piece graphite tip, and powered it with an old pc power supply. The end result is quite nice, though it still needs some kind of temperature control. You may recall seeing other electrical uses for graphite, such as making quick and dirty light.

Digitally Assisted Billiards

December 10, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 29 Comments

pool

[Justin] sent in his Digitally Assisted Billiards project. Using a web cam, a computer and a projector, these guys have set up a system that shows you the trajectories of your current shot. It detects the angle of the cue and displays a glowing blue line showing where each ball would go and where the collisions would be. It is a bit slow right now, and made somewhat less accurate by a low resolution web camera. This could be a fantastic teaching tool if it were to get some more polish. The source code is available on the site, so you could try this one out at home.

SwiitBoard: High Impact Wii Balance Board

December 9, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 6 Comments

swiitboard

[Frits] sent us the SwiitBoard, an improvised version of the Wii balance board. He wanted to be able to do something a little higher impact than he could on the Wii balance board, and required more space to do it in too. Using two different kinds of foam and a piece of plywood, he put together the SwiitBoard. We’re not completely clear on how he is handling direction control. He states that it is derived from gforce.x. Can anyone clarify? Stay tuned after the break for a video of his demo software.

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