Tug Of War… With Your Mind, Man!

July 8, 2012 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

Challenge your friends to a little mental Tug of War thanks to the Omaha Maker Group’s Red Bull Creation contest entry. The power struggle is all in your mind, and can only be won if you’re able to concentrate deeply and quickly. The headsets worn by each competitor monitor brain waves over a ten second window. If you concentrate more deeply than your opponent they’ll get a squirt of water in the face. If no one is concentrating well the contest is a draw the measurements start again. The screenshot above was taken from the test footage found after the break.

Hardware details are scant on this one. Obviously the Bullduino is the centerpiece of the build, taking readings from the headsets. A motor moves the water nozzle along a slit cut in the top of the sphere. Progress during the 10-second window is displayed by that nozzle, which starts in the center yellow ‘safe’ zone and moves to one side or another to enter the green ‘kill’ zone.

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Lift Beer With Quadcopters, Win Prizes

July 6, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 2 Comments

If you have a quadcopter and are looking for a beer delivery device, HobbyKing is putting on a beerlift competition The rules for the HobbyKing beer lift are pretty simple: lift the most beer with a quad/hex/octo copter and win a HobbyKing gift card.

There are 3 classes: Unlimited, which means a vehicle of any size goes, a 700 class for copters with a motor-to-motor diameter of 700 mm or less, and a Disaster class for the coolest crash.

So far the largest lift is a monsterous 2 meter octocopter by [Muresan Alexandru Camil] capable of lifting just over 47kg. In the 700 class, a bizarre looking 9-rotor copter built by the Whac-A-Mole flying team was able to lift 28kg.

The disaster category, a smaller quad built by [Gabriel Devault] was barely able to lift four cans of ~~Coors Light~~ water, while the current disaster class leader made a few valiant efforts to lift a keg. Protip: if you’re doing a blooper reel, Yakety Sax is definitely the way to go.

CNC Zen Gardening

July 6, 2012 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

The Harford Hackerspace in Baltimore, Maryland just went public with the zen garden they built for the Red Bull Creation contest. It’s a CNC creation that will help ease your frustration with that DIY 3d printer that you just can’t seem to get calibrated correctly.

On the hardware side the base of the machine serves as a sandbox. Finding the correct grain size of the medium was one of the more difficult parts of the build. The stylus is driven along three axes using a gantry common in CNC builds. The pulleys and some brackets were 3d printed, with the remained of the brackets being laser cut from wood. The Bullduino commands the stylus via a stepper motor control board, and drives the LEDs via a bank of MOSFETs. Limiting switches were also included to ensure an error didn’t result in damage to the device.

After the break you can see a build montage put to one of the greatest 8-bit game soundtracks of all time. The one thing we wish they would have shown is the built-in leveling bar that is responsible for “erasing” the garden.

Update: The Harford Hackerspace members came through with a new video that shows the ‘erasing’ process. You’ll find it after the break.

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The Most Surprising Game Of Simon You’ve Every Played

July 4, 2012 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

How does one take a game of Simon and make it extremely awesome? The folks at the North Street Labs — a Hackerspace in Portsmouth, Virginia — have found the secret and it’s all in the execution. They turned this chair-desk into a coin-operated Simon game that hides a huge surprise.

We suppose you should be able to guess the secret. Most coin-operated sidewalk attractions are rides, and so is this. As their Red Bull Creation entry the team built a base for the desk around a 2000 Watt floor buffer. These are the kind of things that you’d see a janitor in the 1980’s using to polish the tiles of your middle-school. This one just happens to shake the bejesus out of a player who makes a mistake. To help suck you into the game this won’t happen right away. You have to make it past at least four rounds before making the mistake.

The rest of the game is as expected. The playing area is nicely milled from a piece of wood with acrylic windows serving as the buttons. Apparently the biggest problem with that part of the build is finding a way to hold everything together despite the intense vibrations. See for yourself in the clip after the break.

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Wireless Bullduino Belt Buckle Sets The Stage For Romance, Schtick

July 4, 2012 by Mike Nathan 19 Comments

redbull-romance-pants

As the Red Bull Creation Contest gets underway, we’re seeing a ton of great entries, including this one put together by [Team Instructables]. While we are pretty partial to our own spectacular Red Bull Cannon, it’s hard to deny that there is some stiff competition out there.

Instructables’ “Romance Pants” are a creation that would undoubtedly fit perfectly as a prop piece for any of the Naked Gun movies. The basic premise behind the pants is that when unzipped, the Bullduino belt buckle wirelessly signals the lights in the room to dim, the music to turn up, and candles to light – setting the mood for romance.

Some might argue that anyone wearing a Red Bull-themed Arduino as a belt buckle would have a snowball’s chance in hell of encountering a potential mate – We can’t really argue with you there. That said, their concept is pretty amusing.

Stick around to see the Romance Pants in action, as well as a behind the scenes look at how they work.

[Thanks, Bill!]

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Game Of Chance Built As A Red Bull Creation Entry

July 3, 2012 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

[Tom Bourke] wrote in to show off the game of chance which was built for this year’s Red Bull Creation contest. The project was completed with the help of the Wausau Collaboration Center, a Hackerspace in Wausau, Wisconsin.

He does a great job of showing off the game in the clip after the break. Near the bottom of the device is a hard drive platter which each player can spin to test his or her luck. [Tom] used a max485 chip to turn the leads for the hard drive motor into a quadrature encoder. This input is monitored by the Bullduino board, which puts on a light and sound show during the spin. The LEDs that surround the display are individually addressable (probably the same LED strings as this wall display) and cycle trough different colors based on the rotational speed of the patters. The large seven segment display provides a readout for the random number that is generated. Roll a ten and you win! We guess you need to make the rest of the game up yourself, but this could easily be used as a 16-sided die (or less).

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Turning The Red Bull Cannon To Assault Mode

July 3, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 17 Comments

Once we got our official entry into the red bull creation contest finished and submitted, we figured we might as well kick things up a notch just for giggles. We set up a firing range in the basement at Squidfoo and positioned “herbert”, a mannequin that was left over in the building from a previous tenant, in the sights.

We discovered two things:
1. it is hard to aim this thing precisely. We should have found a laser to affix to the barrel.
2. “Herbert” is the toughest mannequin in the universe. He barely had a chip on him even from point blank range!

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