The idea of using servos to aim a telescope isn’t new, but [John]’s build looks so much like a prop from Johnny Mnemomic that we can’t resist posting it. The goal isn’t so much remote control as it is usability. He added a webcam and a pair of servos to help him fine focus and adjust the elevation of the scope to minimize vibration during those sensitive operations.
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Laser Insect Photography Rig
[Marc] sent in this awesome insect photography rig. The camera is manually pre-focused and set for a 30 second exposure at ISO100. The aluminum cylinder in front of the lens is an external shutter mounted with a custom turned lens adapter. It’s used because the built in shutter is too slow for insect capture. The camera/shutter is triggered by a pair of lasers with photo detectors. When both beams are broken, the insect should be in front of the lens. A Garmin GPS provides position information that’s tagged on the image by the Nikon D200. A large photo of the rig is here, while a more detailed writeup on building it is here.
Update: It looks like we covered a previous version of this rig, but the old links are down and we didn’t have a shot of the setup. Oh, and I forgot to mention [Marc] new control box for running this rig.
Single Side Arduino-ish Beta Board
Via [ladyada], [Raijuu] combined some ideas from [Ladyada]’s boarduino and [evilmadscientists] Atmel business card created his own single sided (for easy etching) project board for ATMega8/128 projects. You can tell that the design is an expression of frustration from past projects; We can definitely appreciate features like separate power and multiple sockets on each pin. (We’d probably consider adding some soldering points to allow for permanent connections.)
Universal Joystick USB Interface
Building on his USB NES pad interface, [Raphaël] released a universal USB joystick interface. It presents a HID device with four directional buttons and eight general purpose buttons. The board uses an ATmega8 and implements USB entirely in software.
Nokia 1100 LCD PIC Controller Interface
Nokia LCDs have been a popular choice for hardware projects for quite a while. [Ramandeep] published a how-to on interfacing the 1100 series LCD with a PIC controller. The 1100 features easily soldered contacts and a backlight, making it an good choice for adding an LCD to your project.
How-To: Make An RGB Combination Door Lock (Part 1)
Part 2 can be found here
Putting a custom designed electronic lock on your space seems like a geek right of passage. For our latest workspace, we decided to skip the boring numbered keypad and build a custom RGB backlit keypad powered by an Arduino. Instead of typing in numbers, your password is a unique set of colors. In today’s How-To, we’ll show you how to build your own and give you the code to make it all work.
Continue reading “How-To: Make An RGB Combination Door Lock (Part 1)”
Accelerometer Mouse From Scratch
[Mahavir] sent in his group’s final project for the College of Engineering in Pune (it’s over here). They built an accelerometer based Bluetooth mouse. They ended up creating a mouse that maps rotational movements to x/y motion. From the video movement, it strikes us as responding the same way that touch pointer mice do. You can hit the demo video after the break or get more details from the project page. Even if you’re not into the mouse idea, you can probably learn something from their Bluetooth implementation.
