Beautiful Modded NES For The 25th Anniversary Of Mega Man, Plus Bonus Interview!

May 8, 2013 by Caleb Kraft 16 Comments

Today I had the pleasure of interviewing [PlatinumFungi] about this fantastic NES mod he did. This year is the 25th anniversary of the first Mega Man video game. Unhappy with the current celebratory actions of capcom, [PlatinumFungi] set out to create something he felt was worthy. He managed to pull that off pretty well.

The NES you can see in the video is fantastic looking. It has a beautiful shiny automotive finish, supplied by [Custom NES Guy] and a pixel perfect backlit Mega Man on top. Additional enhancements are stylized decals on the front of the game bay and matching labels on the sides and back. The cartridge is even illuminated while it is in place.

Check out some pictures after the break!

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High Voltage Thor’s Hammer: Mjolnir At 80,000 Volts

May 2, 2013 by Caleb Kraft 43 Comments

[Thor’s] hammer, Mjolnir, is pretty freaking awesome. It can only be picked up by [Thor], he can use it to fly, and probably the coolest part, it can summon lightning. After watching the first movie, and goofing around with the guys at ArcAttack, I had this idea that I could stuff a tiny tesla coil into a mjolnir and end up with a really cool prop.

At this point, I had to make a decision. I was either going to go portable and live with small arcs, or make this a stationary piece and hide a giant tesla coil in a base. It would have bigger arcs, but I couldn’t carry it around. While I may re-visit the stationary version at some point, I ultimately decided I wanted to be able to wander around and play with this thing.

I had seen some videos of [Staci Elaan] showing off her battery-powered coils and I really liked her results. I figured, with her experience, she could probably do a better job than I could on getting the most bang out of a small package. She was happy to be involved and delivered a small 12v powered coil for me to work with. I should also point out that the coils [Staci] makes are usually donated to educational groups. This woman is awesome.

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The 10 Best Hacking Videos

April 25, 2013 by Caleb Kraft 41 Comments

Say goodbye to the rest of your day. Here are the top 10 best videos about real hacking. We’ve already covered the absolute worst that hollywood has to offer, twice. Then, we did the best that hollywood could pull off. Now we’re enjoying the real thing. Feast your eyes on hacking as it actually happens. In this list are all kinds of hacking, from slapping things together out of scrap to lock picking. From creating computers in your garage to social engineering.

Most of these are even available, in full, on youtube!

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A Quick Tour Of My Workbench

April 25, 2013 by Caleb Kraft 28 Comments

Whenever I release a hackaday video, I invariably get comments and emails about my workbench. Some people are telling me to clean up, others are asking me about things they see in the background.

This isn’t just a set that I film on. Obviously my videos aren’t high enough quality for people to assume that either. This is my actual workbench, made and used by my grandfather. I do enjoy keeping it decorated though. I try to keep a piece of as many past projects as possible hanging on my bench to serve not only as inspiration to me, but also as an interesting backdrop for the videos.

I make no attempts to hide my upcoming projects when I shoot videos. If you pay close enough attention, you can sometimes see projects appear on my bench in videos before the actual project video hits youtube.

I love my workbench. You should love yours too. Hey, maybe you could do a tour of it and post it on youtube for us to admire! Just try not to say “workbench” as many times in a row as I did.

Living Night Light With Glowing Algae

April 18, 2013 by Caleb Kraft 79 Comments

I may sound like I’m being over enthusiastic in this video. I’m not. Everyone who has seen this thinks it is simply amazing.

My father, an ex navy man, has told me stories of glowing water since I was little. Being a person who was obsessed with all things that light up, this always stuck with me. I saw a headline one day that someone was making an algae-light. Sadly when I clicked on it, the algae was just there to create oxygen. It was a cool idea, but not what I was hoping for.

That slight disappointment drove me to create a night light using glowing algae. The process could be extremely simple.

1. Buy Algae.

2. set up light for algae (it needs a 12 hour light cycle and putting it in a window sill would kill it due to heat). It needs bulbs labelled 6500k or higher.

3. shake algae at night (it only lights up when agitated, and when it is on its “night” cycle).

I really wanted to add more to this project though, so I decided to put the algae in a klein bottle and build a custom base for it that would allow me to move a BB around inside the bottle using magnets. This would in turn, hopefully, agitate the algae and make it light up.

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3D Printing Sensor Mounts For The Oculus Rift

April 17, 2013 by Caleb Kraft 7 Comments

While browsing an oculus rift thread on reddit, I saw someone mention how nice it would be to have some actual mounts for external sensors on their Rift. The idea is that adding additional sensors or cameras will allow us to expand the capabilities of the rift. With something like the Razor Hydra, you can add quick positional tracking (the rift only tracks rotation, not position). With some webcams, you could theoretically do some stereoscopic augmented reality. Unfortunately, attaching all these things to the rift is a bit of a pain at the moment.

I had all the things right here in front of me to make this happen, so I did! I’ve quickly tossed together two accessories for the Rift.

1. a small bracket that feeds onto the velcro on the back. People will likely use this for “heavy” position sensors. They may be fairly light, but any additional weight on the front of the rift is unwanted.

2. A snap-on face plate that has a modular design. This wold be for mounting cameras on the front of the rift.

All of these files can be downloaded here.

Hacking The Oculus Rift: The Oculight

April 11, 2013 by Caleb Kraft 23 Comments

Our Oculus Rift finally arrived in the mail. I’ll spare you my thoughts on the item itself other than to say it is amazing. There are tons of videos to choose from that show people’s thoughts and reactions, and Ifixit has their usual detailed teardown as well.

The mod I decided to tackle first was the horizontal peripheral vision lights. The shape of the Oculus means that it feels like you are wearing a skii mask, or diving mask. There are big black borders at the far edges of the sides. It would seem that a simple mod would be to add some RGB LEDs and run a simple ambilight clone.

I downloaded the Adalight code and plugged in an RGB LED strip I had sitting around. The rift has some mesh areas at the 4 corners to allow air to move around in there. I took advantage of this so I didn’t even have to cut into the rift… yet. I simply strapped the strip to the rift with the proper LEDs shining through the holes.

The result was decent. Since the LEDs are further back in your peripheral vision than the edge of the screen, it looks like maybe a little light from the surroundings is just “leaking” into the headset. It gives the impression of seeing things that are far beyond the edge of the screen. A better installation, allowing lights all the way up the left and right sides instead of just the corners might yield even better results.