Autofocus Assist Light

afassist

[Aki]’s Nikon D2H did not come with an autofocus assist light.  His other cameras have them, and he likes the feature, so he decided to hack one into his D2H. He wired into the AF system, so that his LED gets voltage when the shutter release is pressed half way. The circuit needs refinement though, he found that the light was staying on during shutter release and affecting his light metering. You can see the hack in action after the break.
Continue reading “Autofocus Assist Light”

Propeller Halloween Contest Winners

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkUSjf0U-GU]

Meet Skelly, the propeller powered singing skeleton, winning entry to the Unofficial Propeller Halloween Contest. Sick of the massive amounts of Arduino projects floating around the web, [Oldbitcollector] offered a halloween challenge.  Make something spooky using a propeller and other parallax stuff, win a prize. Skelly, made by [Chuck Rice] was the star of the show, so [Chuck] will be getting some USB development boards in the mail.

Escape From Berkeley

Escape From Berkeley (By Any Non-Petroleum Means Necessary) is an alternative-fueled road rally that starts October 10th and ends October 13th. The rally begins in Berkeley, California, and finishes in Las Vegas, Nevada at the Sahara. Contestants are required to use any fuel other than petroleum, and using only those fuels scavenged “for free” along the way. Fuel cannot be purchased. Judges will present awards for both artistic and technical achievements. If you want to get in on the action, there are a number of ways to participate, from registering your vehicle to volunteering for the event or even sponsoring the route “by the mile” or by landmark.

[via Laughing Squid]

Announcing The Ruckingenur Challenge

Back in August, we posted a fantastic reverse engineering game called Ruckingenur II created by [Zach Barth]. Apparently he got an overwhelmingly positive responce as well as many requests for a level editor. [Zach] decided to open this up as a contest, giving wonderful prizes and fame to the winner. Go read the rules and send him some entries. We can’t wait to see what you come up with.

[thanks Zach]

Hack A Day T-Shirt Contest Winner

Congratulations to [John Keppel] for his winning t-shirt design. He wins a Dash Express, an in-car navigation device with both cellular and WiFi data support. It’s running Linux on top of the Openmoko FreeRunner’s hardware platform; yes, [John], we do expect you to hack it. We’ll let all of you know when we plan on putting the shirt into production. Thank you to everyone that entered!

Hack A Day Fail Contest Winner

We had a lot of entries for our Fail contest; there can only be one winner though. We liked [Gordon LaPlante]’s entry pictured above most of all. It’s big, it’s broken, and it’s black and white; that certainly sounds like us. [Gordon] wins $100 worth of No Starch Press merchandise.

There were plenty of other honorable entries. You can view them in the Hack a Day Flickr photo pool. We saw a couple themes emerge during the contest and have highlighted some of them after the break. Continue reading “Hack A Day Fail Contest Winner”