Halloween Links: October 30th, 2013

October 31, 2013 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

Happy Halloween from everyone at Hackaday! To help you enjoy the holiday here are a few festive links:

[Mike Kohn] whipped up a set of motion tracking eyeballs to make his decor extra creepy.

There’s not much to this jet-pack costume but the results are pretty amusing.

The eyes on [Tim Butler’s] skeleton prop don’t follow you around the room, but they do use a PIR sensor to light up the skull.

Speaking of skulls, [Tom] is using some real skulls as decorations. He also added lights where the eyeballs should be, but he is using a photoresistor and comparator to turn on some LEDs.

[Clark] built a Mecha Robot Warrior costume for his son. With all of those LED strips we think he’ll be pretty safe when crossing the street!

And finally, [Jesse] added a lot to his prop in order to produce a Sinister Joker. That’s Joker-as-in-cards and not as in Batman. It’s got an IR distance sensor as a trigger, with a motor to move the wrist, lights for the eyes, and a sound shield to give it a disturbing voice.

Hackaday Links: October 27, 2013

October 27, 2013 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

[Kyle] came across a project which he thinks is “simply elegant”. If you don’t already have a PCB vice, here’s an easy way to build one of your own.

This one’s so good but alas it’s not a hack. Check out the slideshow tour at UC Boulder’s Fiske Planetarium. You get a really cool look at the hardware that makes the dome and projector such a great experience. [via Reddit]

Here’s a schematic and a couple of snapshots of [Trax’s] CAN bus hacking rig. He plans on doing a tutorial but decided to share this link after reading the first part of our own CAN hacking series.

These strings of LEDs bump to the tunes. [Alex] is using GrooveShark as a frequency analyzer, then pushing commands via Node.js to the Arduino controlling the lights. It’s all planned for the back porch during his Halloween party.

We remember drilling holes in the 3.5″ floppy discs (we even made a wood jig for this) to double their capacity. A similar blast from the past was to punch a notch in the larger 5.25″ versions to make them double-sided.

If you’re trying to learn about FFT [Ronald] highly recommends this website. We didn’t do too much poking around because it’s kind of strange. But if you do get sucked in and have fun with it leave a comment to let others know it’s worth their attention.

We suppose that using 39 Raspberry Pi boards and their camera modules isn’t the worst way to build a huge 3D model capture rig. The results certainly are impressive. [Thanks Wouter]

Hackaday Links: October 20, 2013

October 20, 2013 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

Winter is coming. We’ve see those gloves in stores made specifically to work with your smartphone. [hardsoftlucid] isn’t buying it. He made his own version using… well, you just have to see it.

Here’s an eBookmark for a real book. What? Well, you know how an eReader does a great job of keeping your place between reading sessions? This is an electronic bookmark for paper books which uses LEDs to show you where you last left off reading. [via Adafruit]

[Thomas Brittain] wrote in to share his BLE Module and Pulse sensor updates. Both were featured in a recent Fail of the Week column and the latest iteration takes them from fail to functioning!

You may be able to get a free XMOS xCORE starter kit. The company is giving away 2500 of them. [Thanks Tony]

After learning about custom labels for microcontroller pinouts from [John Meachum] we’re happy to get one more helpful tip: a breadboard trench is a great place to hide axial decoupling capacitors.

A bit of cutting, solder, and configuring lets you turn a simple gamepad into a 4-controller interface for MAME.

Many of the Hackaday Staff are into Minecraft (between Let’s Play videos, running servers, and building computers in-game it’s a wonder we get anything done around here). We restrained ourselves by not making this video of a Restone circuit Blender animation on your desktop into a full front page feature. [via Reddit]

Hackaday Links: October 13, 2013

October 13, 2013 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

This week’s post on core rope ROM was pretty popular. [Joey] wrote in with a book recommendation for those that found the project interesting. Digital Apollo discusses the technology which NASA built into the guidance computer. That was also the subject of a recent Retrotechtacular.

A few members of the Vancouver Hack Space came up with their own take on the Word Clock. It uses an old monitor, a laser-cut bezel, and Javascript to light up the correct characters.

When we last looked in on [Vincent’s] plywood stool project he had branched out into plywood folding chairs as well. Here’s two updates on his progress.

This one’s just silly. To keep up with his wife on exercise goals, this guy cheated using a reciprocating saw to spoof his exercise. Tape the FitBit to the saw blade, clamp the saw to the workbench, and then let her rip! [via Reddit]

[Harrison] wrote into share the Arduino button library he developed. It is designed to allow detection of multiple types of button events without blocking other operations. He came up with the project to use with his motorcycle hacking.

It looks like [Bertho] has kitted up his Executive Decision Maker. We first saw this as a perfboard project a couple of years ago.

And finally, [Bob Alexander] makes your hard drive clock look puny. His uses the platter from a 40-year-old mainframe hard drive.

Hackaday Links: October 6, 2013

October 6, 2013 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

The iBeacon has been all over the interwebs lately. Here’s a riff on the Arduino Pro MIni that adds a BLE module. It can be used to make an iBeacon clone. You can also hack a VTag keyfinder to operate in much the same way.

Remember that post about pulling a QR Code generator into Google Docs? One could argue that the best use of this functionality is to add labels to your parts storage that lead back to the product page for the component. [Thanks Nicholas]

[Michael] wrote in to share his crowd funding campaign. He is a school teacher and wants to publish a detective story that gets kids excited about STEM.

Our own [James Hobson] made the first cut to be [Adam Savage’s] new assistant. He’s the [TheHacksmith] (read our staff page if you don’t believe us) and is the third entry featured in this vignette. Apparently they’ve got something against Canadians because they say he’s ineligible due to his nationality!?

If you’ve ever been confused about the features of different Xbee modules this comparison chart may be of assistance.

A couple of weeks ago we learned about a contest put on by TheControllerProject. [TouchStone936] gets credit for quick, easy, and functional. His solution to making shoulder buttons more accessible includes hot-glue, a golf tee, and a binder clip. Pretty clever!

Wanting a better color of backlight for his eReader, [Vivek Gani] cracked it open and applied Kapton Tape as a gel to soften the hue.

And finally something very silly. If you put a strong enough prop on the front, you can get just about anything to fly. This instance involves a flying pizza box which to us looks particularly un-flight-worthy. [via Gizmodo]

Hackaday Links: September 29, 2013

September 29, 2013 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

We would be remiss if we didn’t mention that all of SparkFun’s open source hardware is now on Upverter.

Not wanting to tie up an iPad as a mini-gaming cabinet [Hartmut] hacked an Arcadi cabinet to use EUzebox instead.

Time travel happens in the bedroom as well. But only if you have your very own Tardis entrance. [AlmostUseful] pulled this off with just a bit of word trim and a very nice paint job. [via Reddit]

[Pierre] tricks an iPhone fingerprint scanner by making a replica out of hot glue.

Some of the guys from our parent company were over in Shanghai on business. [Aleksandar Bradic] made time to visit the Shanghai hackerspace while in town and wrote about the experience over on their engineering blog.

[Gregory Charvat] is a busy guy. In fact we’ve got a juicy hack of his saved up that we still need to wrap our minds around before featuring. In the mean time check out the Intern-built coffee can radar that he took over and tested on a multi-million dollar Spherical Near Field Range.

And finally, everyone loves coffee hacks, right? Here’s what [Manos] calls a Greek style instant coffee machine.

Hackaday Links: September 22, 2013

September 22, 2013 by Mike Szczys 42 Comments

First we start with some protection… for your USB charged devices. Here’s a USB Condom which acts as a pass-through for the power rails but not the data lines. This prevents untrusted charger security exploits. [Thanks Markus]

[OutKastz] seems to think he’s uncovered a price matching conspiracy at Best Buy. His post references an HDTV video wall he has built. But he also discovered that there are two different version of the same television sold as the same SKU. His theory is that this prevents the big box from matching prices on half of their inventory.

When you’re in need of some breadboarding action with your Raspberry Pi and want to make it as painless as possible you need to build your own Pi Cobbler. This is the diy version of an Adafruit product, built using a couple of pin headers, stripboard, and an IDE cable.

Speaking of Adafruit, did you see Ladyada’s teardown of an ICEdot crash sensor?

[Phineas] is showing off a really really small hexacopter. Check out the maiden flight, as well as first indoor and first outdoor tests.

Perhaps this coded entry system will inspire a future project for you. It uses piezo elements to enter a code which unlocks the back door to the company. The glass door already had a series of large dots painted on it. This turns out to be a nice interface for a four button code system.

Many projects use a Raspberry Pi as a web server. But there is more than just one flavor available. [Jeremy Morgan] performed a variety of Pi server benchmarks using Nginx, Monkey, Lighttpd, and Apache. [Thanks Walter]

Can an old TV antenna reflector be used to boost the range of a WiFi dongle? We’re a bit skeptical. Let us know what you think in the comments.

And finally, we do wish there was more information on this upright piano used to play Doom [Thanks Itay].