Hackaday Links: October 31, 2010

October 31, 2010 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

Happy Halloween to one and all. Let’s celebrate the holiday with some related links.

[Brandon] carved the Hackaday logo into his Jack-‘o-Lantern. But that’s not all, inspired by EMSL’s Jack-‘o-Lantern, as well as our own offering, he added LEDs. Three of them occupy the flesh behind the eyes and nose, fading in and out thanks to some pulse-width modulation that an Arduino provides.

Mad Scientist Blinken Costume

[Bill Porter] is getting down with the LEDs by making a Mad Scientist costume. The accent jewelry is an LED matrix necklace that he made himself to go along with 76 of them sewn into the coat. Also joining the party is over one hundred feet of wire and two Arduinos.

Dole Out Candy Via Twitter/Phone

Apparently [Noel Portugal] will be too busy hacking together his next project to dish out candy on Halloween. To make up for his double-booked schedule he built an automated candy dispenser. Just tweet your request and the bucket will open a hatch from which candy will fall. There’s also an option to activate it with a voice call, or just slap that red button until your blood sugar reaches an adequate level.

Star Wars Pumpkins

[Charles Gantt] carved Yoda’s mug into his pumpkin and backlit it with green LEDs. Someone else paired two together for a Death Star shoots Alderon scene [via Reddit]. If those aren’t enough for you there’s a Star Wars top 10 collection out there somewhere.

Now go start working on next year’s props!

Hackaday Links: October 24, 2010

October 24, 2010 by Mike Szczys 51 Comments

Square Gears

This video demonstrates square gears and other oddly shaped cogs. We can’t think of a use but it’s interesting none-the-less. [via Tinkernology]

Cooking with Lasers

It’s late and you’ve been at the workbench for quite some time. But why go to the kitchen for a snack? Grab a couple of 1 watt lasers, hot glue a kernel of corn to a DC motor, and you’ll have popcorn in no time.

Calling this a simulator just doesn’t do it justice

Okay, so this link is a Lexus commercial. But it’s worth watching to see the footage of this driving simulator. Inside that pod is an actual automobile surrounded by a 360 degree screen. The room has a full x and y axis to move the pod (and the car) as you drive through the simulated world. It’s like someone gave a bunch of geeks an unlimited budget and say “go nuts”. [Thanks Luke]

What takes the most time in your hacking adventures?

Everyone whose spent some time in web design has run across the peculiar rendering bugs and workarounds associated with Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer Stole My Life aims to tabulate the collective time wasted from the lives of developers. We think it’s hilarious because spending the same amount of time meeting W3C standards and this problem would go away. But [Caleb] mentioned something interesting when he saw this site: What part of your hacking adventures wastes the most time? We’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Hackaday Links: October 17, 2010

October 17, 2010 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

Cards you should crank

These greeting cards must be the product of a mechanical engineer run amok. They come with a crank and are designed to entertain with their simple, yet elegant movements. [Thanks Phil]

Magnetic card stripe reader

[JP] built an Arduino based magnetic card reader. It uses off-the-shelf parts but if you don’t mind buying the components this will get you up and running in no time. If you want more info there’s also this Teensy based version.

Homemade Airsoft sentry gun

This sentry gun has an amazingly fast firing rate that can continue for quite a while, thanks to the big flashlight housing that is holds a lot of ammo. [Thanks David]

Scanner easter egg

The engineers over at HP had a little fun building an easter egg into this scanner. If you know what you’re doing you can get it to play the Ode to Joy. It needs to join the old-hardware band from our Links post earlier in the month. [Thanks Googfan]

Hackaday Links: October 10, 2010

October 10, 2010 by Mike Szczys 21 Comments

Old timey pics with a new timey camera

Update: We’ve already looked at this one… see the full article for all the details.

One way to get old-looking photographs is to use a vintage camera. Then again you can just connect a 1908 lens to a modern dslr with great results. [Thanks MS3FGX]

Cheap iPad mounting bracket

Need a way to hang your iPad but don’t want to spend some bucks? [Tumbleweed] used a $3 plate hanger to do the trick.

Hand engraving

You can get free laser engraving when you buy an iPhone but it won’t look as good as this does. [Viljo Marrandi] spent eight hours on this, but most of the time was spent resharpening tools dulled by the tough metal.

Let time prevent your computer from going idle

Want to keep your screen saver from running? No need to change settings, software, or use special hardware. Just set your mouse on an analog watch and let the moving hands jiggle it around. [Thanks Lovro]

Hackaday Links: October 3, 2010

October 3, 2010 by Mike Szczys 32 Comments

Sugar rocket

We’re told that this rocket is sugar powered. It’s quite a bit bigger than the homemade sugar motors we saw last week and it makes for quite a show. [Thanks Estqwerty]

Wooden PC construction

The finished look of this wooden PC case seems very familiar to us but we’re not sure we’ve seen pictures of the build process(updated link, sorry [Jeff]) before. There’s something extremely satisfying about how well its creator works with a file. [Thanks Anders]

Working on top

We never realized that this job existed, but if you repair communication towers it’s a heck of a climb to work. The video of a two-man crew climbing a 1600 foot tower is one of the most interesting we’ve seen this year. [via Blogging Protagonist]

Lego typing machine

[Dougal’s] typing machine types his name… over and over again. An interesting little piece of mechanical engineering, we’d have to think for a while to decide the best use for this little guy. [Thanks Chris]

Typing on a different type of keyboard

Here’s another typing machine but this time it’s not a keyboard and not purely mechanical. Pictured is one of the performers in an old equipment ensemble performing with whining stepper motors, speech synthesis, an other antiquated noise-makers. [Thanks Mike]

Hackaday Links: September 19, 2010

September 19, 2010 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

6502 Gate Simulator

Ever wondered what’s going on inside that chip as the program executes? Now you can take a look at the die itself with this visual gate simulator for the 6502 processor. [Thanks Puli and Svofski]

Copper corrosion

[Moogle] cracked open his DockStar to find corroded copper. It seems that Seagate left a portion of the ground plane unprotected and it reacted badly with the shielding metal. If you have one of these devices you might want to crack it open and tin the exposed copper so that it will hold up over time.

Segway kickstand

Don’t want your Segway to flop over when you park it? Follow [Paul’s] lead in building a kickstand for the self-balancer. You can just make it out in the image above. It’s a dumbell that folds down from the handlebar tube when you’re not on board.

Tesla makes everything better

Do you like the song Iron Man? We think it’s better when our friend Nikola takes part.

No Smoking

Smoking is really quite bad for you. Plus you can’t chain smoke nearly as efficiently as this mechanical smoking machine can so don’t even try. [Thanks Ferdinand]

Hackaday Links: August 29, 2010

August 29, 2010 by Mike Szczys 36 Comments

Hotel room door lock picking

Here’s further proof that you should never leave anything of value in your hotel room. We’re not worried about someone getting in while the room is occupied. But these methods of defeating the chain lock and opening the door without a keycard (YouTube login required) do show how easy it is for the bad guys to steal your stuff.

iPhone frequency generator

Need one more way to make that iPhone a useful lab tool? Why not use it as a frequency generator. Start with a free app and mix in an audio cable with test leads and you’re in business.

Drag Soldering

[Andrei] sent us a link to a video about drag soldering. This is a method of soldering fine-pitch chips using a small bit of solder and a fat solder tip. The link he sent is dead now but we found another great example of the process. We were just using this method earlier in the week to solder a TSSOP38 package for an upcoming project and it worked like a charm.

Laser etched PCB

Here’s some art in PCB form thanks to a laser. We thought this might be interesting to share after seeing those art pieces made from old circuit boards. This example is laser etched, but not directly. As you probably guessed, the copper clad board is coated with resist and the laser etches some of it away. Whatever got zapped by the laser dissolves when the board is placed in acid, leaving [Riley Porter’s] art behind.