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Hackaday Links: October 31st, 2012

October 31, 2012 by 3 Comments

LED Marquee Pumpkin

Here’s an LED marquee as the mouth of a Jack-o’-lantern which [Mike Skoczen] made. This comes hot on the heels of that playable Tetris Pumpkin. [Thanks Jacob]

Arduino-powered robot costume

This is a sideways view of the Arduino-powered costume [Dan] and his wife made for their son. It has lights, buttons, a character display, and makes noise.

Cylon Centurion from a pumpkin

Stuck inside because of the hurricane, [Shawn] and his girlfriend carved this Cylon Centurion pumpkin complete with lights and sound.

8×8 LED costume ‘face’

[Matthew] built this helmet which features an 8×8 RGB LED matrix as the face. He calls it the digital reaper. You can see him testing the electronics in this clip.

Makerspace costume roundup

[Jeff] wrote in to tell us about the Halloween preparations at the Port City Makerspace in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Here we have a Ghost Busters Proton Pack, weeping angel wings from Dr. Who, and an Arc Reactor from Ironman.

Hackaday Links: October 18, 2012

October 18, 2012 by 5 Comments

Capacitive touch plants

Here’s a proof of concept for using plants as a capacitive touch sensor. The sensor is simply a hunk of double-sided copper clad board attached to a microcontroller. But it seems to be able to sense what part of the plant is being touched. [Thanks Fabien]

Adding wireless charging to a Nokia N900

This hack is quite common, but it’s still fun to see what hardware is being outfitted with an inductive charger. This time it’s a Nokia N900 that’s ditching the charging cables.

Wii carrying suitcase from a plastic tackle box

This Wii carrying case (translated) looks great and cost just a few bucks. It started as a tackle box for carrying around your fishing lures. But a bit of creative cutting and there’s a place for everything.

Browser based schematic and board layout

There’s a new kid on the block when it comes to circuit design. Circuits.io offers in-brower schematic design and board artwork layout. [Thanks ADIDAIllinie (and a few others)]

Bender-o-lantern

Halloween rapidly approaches and we hope that [Tim’s] carving of Bender in a pumpkin will inspire you to send in your own Halloween projects.

Hackaday Links: October 6, 2012

October 6, 2012 by 33 Comments

Upgrading a desktop with a diamond cutting wheel

[Michail] needed a new graphics card. The only problem was his motherboard didn’t have any free PCI-E x16 slots available. Unable to find a PCI-E x1 card, he did what any of us would do and broke out the Dremel. Yes, he got it working, but don’t do this unless you know what you’re doing.

It’s recycling!

[Steve] recently got a Galaxy S3 and was looking for something to do with his old phone. It’s got WiFi, it’s got a camera, and with a free app, [Steve] now has an IP Webcam. Neat way to recycle a phone.

This is now bookmarked

We’re not much for plugging other blogs, but Math ∩ Programming – that’s intersection, remember – is really cool. Apparently it has been around for a little more than a year and already there are quite a few really cool posts. How to use cellular automaton to generate caves in video games and facial recognition through Eigenvalues are amazingly in depth, and show the theory behind some really cool techniques. Very, very cool.

Troll Physics: now wireless!

Remember [Fredzislaw100], the guy who puzzled the Internet with impossible circuits? He’s back again, this time with wireless LEDs. We’re guessing something similar to an induction charging system in the battery clip, wirelessly coupled to something under the paper, and that is wirelessly coupled to the LEDs. Your guess will probably be better than ours, though.

Not shown: Captain Obvious, Major Major

Pv2 [Zachary Ricks] of the U.S. Army thought we would get a kick out of the last name of one of the guys in his company. Yes, it’s ‘Hackaday,’ and yes, it’s a real surname. Here’s the full pic [Zach] sent in. Apparently it’s a name along the lines of ‘Holiday.’ Honestly, we had no idea this was a real surname, but we’re thinking Private Hackaday could use a care package or two (dozen).

Anyone up for sending a few hacker friendly (for [Zach] and a few other guys) care packages? Even socks or books or Oreos would make for an awesome care package. Email me if you want the mailing address.

Hackaday Links: October 3, 2012

October 3, 2012 by 15 Comments

Cheap ergonomic mouse

If your had keeps cramping while using the computer mouse why not grab a hunk of wood and a couple of buttons to make your own ergonomic input device?

C# GUI for Arduino testing

Here’s a Windows GUI for controlling Arduino. [Rohit] put it together using C#. It should make development very simple as you have control of almost everything before you need to worry about writing your own server-side software.

Networked strip lighting replaces the office overheads

[Jeremy] got tired of replacing the halogen bulbs in his office. He upgraded to ten meters of RGB LED strips. We can’t think they do as well at lighting up the room. But he did add network control so they can flash or change colors depending on what type of alert they’re signalling.

Woven QR codes

Now that [Andrew Kieran] proved you can weave a working QR code into textiles do you think we’ll see garments that have a QR code leading to care instructions? We could never figure out what all those strange icons stood for.

World’s largest QR code in a corn maze

The world’s largest QR code was cut out of this field of corn. It’s at the Kraay Family Farm in Alberta, Canada. Gizomodo called it “Stupidly Pointless”. But we figure if it got them a world record and put their website on the front page of Giz and Hackaday they’re doing okay. Plus, we whipped out our Android and it read the QR code quite easily.

Hackaday Links: September 21, 2012

September 21, 2012 by 31 Comments

And then Obi-wan said, “you were supposed to be the chosen one!”

Yesterday, a little bird told us Makerbot will be moving to a closed source model for their newest printer. This was confirmed, and now [Zach Smith] a.k.a. [Hoeken] – creator of the RepRap Research Foundation and co-founder of Makerboth Industries is weighing in with his take on the situation.

Hey! Free stuff!

Remember that DIP28 ARM chip with BASIC? Remember how I told you Coridium will be giving a few hundred away as samples? Yeah, that’s happening now.

Replacing a scroll wheel with titanium

[Rhett] has been using a Logitech mouse for a few years now. Recently the scroll wheel became corroded, so [Rhett] replaced it with a titanium version. The perfect match for the trusty battle axe, theIBM Model M keyboard.

Web-based IDE for the Raspi

[Phil Torrone] sent in a video of something he and [ladyada] are working on. It’s a web-based IDE for the Raspberry Pi. We’ll do a full review of this when it’s released.

Intro to software defined radio

So you have one of those TV tuner dongles and want to get in to software defined radio. Where do you start? [Al Williams] over at Dr. Dobbs has a great introduction to SDR, and gives a few pointers that should help you get that cool looking waterfall plot very quickly. Thanks for sending this in, [Chris].

Hackaday Links: Sept 15, 2012

September 15, 2012 by 13 Comments

Very tiny keyboard

The idea behind the iControlPad2 is pretty simple – just take the slide-out keyboard from a phone, discard the phone part, add two analog sticks and a D-pad, and put Bluetooth in it. It makes for a very small keyboard perfect for controlling a Raspi, a home media server, or even a phone or tablet. I think it’s cool, anyway.

I mustache you a question. Where’s the Hawaiian Shirt?

At her local hackerspace, [Akki] heard someone pronouncing Raspberry Pi as, “Raspberry pee eye.” Of course this joke needed to be taken to its fullest absurdity, so [Akki] gave her Raspi a [Tom Selleck] mustache. Slightly better than the Googly Eyes Arduino shield.

Not giving a Flip about proprietary batteries

When powering a Flip video camera, [Dan] had two choices: regular AA batteries, or a proprietary battery rechargeable through the USB port. When the rechargeable battery is inserted, it closes a small switch telling the Flip it can recharge these batteries. Wanting to put his own rechargeable batteries in his camera, [Dan] closed the switch with a little bit of cardboard, thus allowing him to use his own NiMH rechargeable batteries.

Building operating systems from scratch

A while ago we posting something about a Cambridge professor putting up a tutorial for developing an operating system from scratch on the Raspberry Pi. [Joey] decided to follow these tutorials and has a blog dedicated to his adventures in OS development. It’s not a custom UNIX-inspired OS yet….

Put a quarter in, get a goldfish

[Yooder] over on Reddit spent a week turning a gumball machine into a fish tank. A very nice build that is now home to a few neon tetras. Check out the imgur album for a full build walkthrough.

Hackaday Links: September 11, 2012

September 11, 2012 by 12 Comments

Xbee sensors at Lowe’s?

Lowe’s, the home improvement big box store, is selling some home automation items which might be Xbee compatible. They’re being sold under the brand name Iris. There is some debate as to whether they’re Xbee, or just 802.15.4 hardware. Either way they might be worth checking out for your wireless projects.

Father sword replica from Conan the Barbarian

Sometimes its just fun to watch the master at work. In this case it’s a blacksmith replicating the sword from Conan the Barbarian. [via Reddit]

LG washing machine that phones home

LG has built an interesting troubleshooting feature into some of their washing machines. This video shows the encoded audio it will output if you use the right button combination. You’re supposed to hold your phone up to the machine while talking to customer service and they’ll be able to get some type of debugging information from the dial-up modem type of sounds. If you end up decoding this audio we want to know about it! [Thanks Pedro]

MicroSD card adapter for Raspberry Pi

[TopHatHacker] was surprised to see a full-sized SD card slot on the Raspberry Pi. His temporary solution to get his microSD card working was to uses a miniSD adapter. He cut away the case and bent the pins until they lined up with the microSD card.

Batman’s cowl for retro motorcycle enthusiasts

Okay, we think this Batman cowl in the style of 1950’s motorcycle garb is pretty cool. Just realize that if you’re seen wearing this you will be thought of as one of the crazy guys in town. [via BoingBoing]