Hackaday Links: February 14, 2010

February 14, 2010 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

$30,000?

Is it art or is it a puzzle? Well, it functions as a game but it’s certainly a work of art and priced accordingly. The Superplexus was featured in Make Mazine and Hammacher Schlemmer sells it for thirty grand (you can’t just click to add it to your cart though). Think of the work that went into developing this! [via The Awesomer]

Rollable Display Update

[SeBsZ] continues work on his rollable display matrix. He’s got twenty five controller boards now and has them working as a matrix. We originally covered this in January but now it’s much easier to see how this can be made portable by mounting it on fabric or canvas. Check out the demo video if your interested.

Security testing suite

BackTrack 4 final has been released. If you didn’t like it when it was rough around the edges, you should give it another try. This lean and mean Linux ditro is made for security testing and is approachable for noob and pro alike. [Thanks Steve]

Power on the go

[Csae] uses this portable power center to fire up some studio strobes outside. It consists of a case, an uninterruptible power supply, and a couple of extension cords all hacked together into one. At first you might think this is a bit ghetto but it’s portable and it does what is intended.

Happy Valentine’s Day

Giving this LED-heart adorned shirt as a gift is sure to make your Valentine head for the hills. This project’s a few year’s old, but gawdy T-shirts never go out of style, right?

Hackaday Links: February 7, 2010

February 7, 2010 by Mike Szczys 14 Comments

Bot gives head to passersby

This free range robot was spotted at this year’s Kinetica Art Fair. You can place your hand above it and it will stop and pour you a beer. That’s if you consider 7/8 of a glass of head ‘a beer’.

Photo booth adds fun – consumes floor space

Face it, photo booths are fun, and if they’re free a lot of people will use them. This particular booth was built in some guy’s apartment, adding the fun but eating up floor space. But this would be a great build for your next group gathering, just like the Crushtoberfest. [via DVICE]

More human through-hole design

[Fridgehead] stuck and 5mm LED in his earlobe and then used a microcontroller to make it pulse. He’s got quite a mop and that’s where he hides the black controller pack. The next version should be RGB and the smallest surface mount packages he can solder. At least this isn’t disgusting like the LED nipple ring.

Chandelier your wife will never let you install

This 300 LED chandelier uses epoxy coated wires draped around the light ring to resemble a more traditional crystal light fixture. It’ll still be a hard sell if you want to hang this over the dinner table. [via Gizmodo]

A touch of copper

[Zombie84] built a prototype of a robot arm out of copper pipe. There’s not much info here, but you can see some wires in the wrist that appear to function as tendons. This reminds us of the characters from 9.

Hackaday Links: January 31st, 2010

January 31, 2010 by Mike Szczys 14 Comments

Marble Junker

Here’s a quick and dirty kinetic sculpture. It’s a track for a steel marble to roll around in with a magnet on a rotating wheel to pick it up and start it over again. Not every hack has to be a beautiful masterpiece, they just need to be fun. Of course, if this were an incredibly complicated piece it probably wouldn’t have ended up in a links post.

Eight-eyed Computer

[AlexP] has been involved in the NUI Group and in writing drivers for the PS3 Eye. This time around he’s got eight of them running on one computer at 60fps. Security cameras come to mind but this could be useful in a lot of projects. We’d be interested in seeing what you come up with. [Thanks Kyle]

Urine-gone

If you have a problem with folks peeing on your stoop then this is the answer. [Hannes Nehls] put together a urinating-drunkard deterrent by placing a humidity sensor in the (achem…) trouble-spot and a small tube above. When they pee on the sensor, it pees right back on them. Video available if you click through to the link.

Amplifier Tutorial

If you’re a little shaky when it comes to understanding and working with amplifiers this tutorial is for you. It’ll walk you through the basic concepts, then apply that knowledge in a simple op-amplifier circuit.

Severed Heads

It’s always nice to end a links post with something creepy. These faces are made from a cast of the artist’s face. They sing a trio of nonsense and it’s the life-like movements combined with the obviously mechanical backend that tingles our spine. But they’re really just a novelty and not the real thing. [Thanks Browneyedalbino][via Powered by Nerd]

Hackaday Links: Sunday January 24

January 24, 2010 by Jakob Griffith 16 Comments

Everyone Remembers Free day right? [The Ideanator’s] Bus Pirate came in such a nice red box – he decided to make it his permanent case.

[Chico] is in the middle of making a CNC, but decided to make some music with the steppers in the mean time.

What looks like an old wooden box is actually [Ludvig’s] super sweet retro arcade cabinet. Complete with a giant emergency stop red button.

Who says Legos are dead? [Carl] used them to create a simple and cheap diffraction grating projector. Including video!

[Torchris] used an Ethernet shield exactly as it was designed, sending data over Ethernet. Still a nice hack for those needing help working with Ethernet shields and Arduino.

Finally [Robert] let us know about a friends Arduino Binary Clock. But we think his elegant use of tape and a sand blaster to engrave glass is cooler.

Hackaday Links: January 17th, 2010

January 17, 2010 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

Apple Magic Mouse on Windows

Looks like some folks snooped around the latest Bluetooth update from Apple and managed to extract the Magic Mouse drivers. Now you can use them to take this complex peripheral for a spin on Windows. [Thanks Juan]

Component jewelry: From geeky to gross

[Nikolaus] made a pair of 300k Ohm earrings for his wife. That’s three Brown-Black-Yellow resistors per ear. It’s geeky but in a subtle way. Much more refined than the gross outcome of this other guy’s crass nipple experiments. Need to get the image of nipple-jewelry out of your head? [Nikolaus] has you covered with some 3d printed earrings.

GTK GPS

Need your GPS data to be accurate within a centimeter? We don’t either but if you ever do, Real Time Kinematic GPS is what you need. Now you can build one yourself using the RTLIB package. This is based around the powerful and powerfully-inexpensive Beagleboard. [Thanks Jan]

Messy music

It warmed up here a bit this week and things got slushy. Our Galoshes are nice and water-tight but [David’s] have a big hole in the side and are filled with a mini-keyboard. He’s chosen a rubber boot as the housing for a circuit-bending project. It’s a nice touch that the hidden keys are still playable through the flexible rubber.

Hackaday Links: January 14th, 2010

January 14, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 21 Comments

We saw this home made beekeepers hood posted and actually mistook it for an art piece. We thought it was a Super Mario squid. You can see an example on this image, which is located on a site dedicated to cross stitching video game characters.

In an odd coincidence, not related to the 8 bit textiles above, we also found this Mario themed sweater. We wouldn’t wear it, but we’d love to see Wil Wheaton in it.

No. No no no. Bad Scientists. No treat for you.

There are 4 more links after the break, you’ll want to see them to get that baby out of your head.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: January 14th, 2010” →

Hackaday Links: December 27, 2009

December 27, 2009 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

Brain Controlled Game

If you’re a fan of biometrics this game is for you. It uses a homemade EEG to facilitate simple control. This is along the same lines as the Force Trainer hacks but this homebrew hardware is fun to look at. The success of the project can be seen in the video of a simple game they developed.

RF Camera Remote

[Jonny] wanted to trigger his Nikon camera remotely but was unhappy with the functionality of the IR remote. He hacked together an RF remote and receiver that still uses the IR functionality of the camera, but allows for the geographic freedom of Radio Frequency. Not as advanced as some we’ve seen but it meets his specifications.

CNC Mill

[Jan] tipped us off about a CNC mill that her friend made. The machine turned out beautifully even though very few tools were used to produce it. We love to pour over these builds so if you’ve done one, document it and send it in.

Neutering the On Demand Button

[Dan] hated his Comcast remote because the On Demand button could be hit by mistake. This was usually when trying to unpause live TV. The remainder of the show couldn’t be viewed just because the On Demand menu launched. Simplicity is king. He fixed this by placing two small paper rolls between the button and the circuit board. This way the button can still be used but only if you press pretty hard.