Hackaday Links: June 12, 2012

June 12, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 25 Comments

Amazing 3D rendering in real-time

Ah, the 90s. A much simpler time when the presenters on Bad Influence! were amazed by the 3D rendering capabilities of the SGI Onyx RealityEngine2. This giant machine cost £250,000 back in the day, an amazing sum but then again we’re getting nostalgic for old SGI hardware.

Well, Mega is taken… let’s call it Grande

[John Park] needed to put something together for last month’s Maker Faire. A comically large, fully functional Arduino was the obvious choice. If you didn’t catch the demo last month, you can grab all the files over on Thingiverse.

Is that an atomic clock in your pocket or… oh, I see.

Here’s the world’s smallest atomic clock. It’s made for military hardware, so don’t expect this thing to show up at Sparkfun anytime soon; we can’t even fathom how much this thing actually costs. Still, it’ll be awesome when this technology trickles down to consumers in 10 or 20 years.

Converting a TRS-80 keyboard to USB

[Karl] is working on an awesome project – putting a Raspberry Pi inside an old TRS-80. The first part of the project – converting a TRS-80 keyboard to USB – is already complete. We can’t wait to see this build finished.

A DIY Propeller dev board

Last week we complained about the dearth of builds using the Parallax Propeller. A few noble tinkerers answered our call and sent in a few awesome builds using this really unique micro. [Stefan]’s Propeller One is the latest, and looking at the schematics it should be possible to etch a single-sided board for this project. Awesome work and thanks for giving us a weekend project, [Stefan].

Hackaday Links: June 3, 2012

June 3, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 30 Comments

When pigs fly…. close enough.

There are too many jokes to be made about this one. It’s a quadcopter made out of a dead cat. [Bert Jansen], the artist behind this, calls him Orville. He died from natural causes, and what better way to remember a feline friend that liked chasing birds?

Refurbishing an Apple ][

That thirty year old computer in your parent’s attic isn’t going to clean itself, is it? [Todd] put up a series of videos tearing down a 1982 Apple ][ plus, cleaning everything along the way, and doing a very nice demo of AppleSoft BASIC. This is where the revolution started, people.

Ohm sweet Ωhm

Cross stitch isn’t for grandmothers anymore. Adafruit put up a cross stitch tutorial to go along with their resistor color code cross stitch kit. Now down to Hobby Lobby to find black cross stitch cloth and make the ‘ol skull ‘n wrenches.

Welcome! To the world of yesterday!

Boing Boing found an amazing cyberpunk photo spread that appeared in the Mondo 2000 ‘zine back around 1992 or 1993. Even when keeping in mind that this is a self-parody, it’s still incredible. Hackers have laser pointers? And pagers?

Making Arduino projects smaller

[Scott] caught wind of a way to shrinkify Arduino projects, so he turned an Arduino protoboard into an ATtiny85 programmer. As a neat bonus, [Scott] can use the attached breadboard to build circuits around the ’85.

Hackaday Links: May 29, 2012

May 29, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 25 Comments

Teensy CNC mill

The guys at Inventables put together a neat CNC router kit that looks very interesting. It uses Makerslide linear bearings and CNC’d parts to make a surprisingly cheap frame for something that can engrave wood and metal. Inventables is running a Kickstarter-esque preorder to fund this production run but right now they’re 30 orders short. We’d like to see how these routers turn out in the real world, so if you’re on the fence (or just want a CNC router), this might be the time to buy.

DIY solder fume extractor

[Jared] sent in a fume extractor he put together. It’s a small PC case fan with a carbon filter sandwiched between a pair of grilles. Not much, but if should keep those wonderful flux fumes away from your face.

A million fake Internet points to the first person to come up with a DIY clone

[filespace] shared an awesome Electrofishing video with us. Electrofishing pulses a DC current through two electrodes attached to a boat. This current causes galvanotaxis in fish, causing them to swim towards the anode. The fish can be caught with a net and released afterwards; there’s no damage to the fish at all. We’d love to see a DIY solution, but throwing M-80s into a lake doesn’t count.

Improving GSM reception with a bit of metal

[Raivis] lives in the country, so even his voice reception on GSM is terrible, let alone data. Inspired by an earlier post, [Raivis] built a discone antenna to improve his cell signal. Now everything is crystal clear and his Huawei E1752 USB/GSM modem improved from 3 mbps down to 5 mbps down.

CNC halftone photos

[Dana] sent in a few pics of a project he’s working on. He’s making halftone prints with a CNC and metal. We’ve seen this before, but we’re really loving [Dana]’s take on it. He’s using two-layer engraving plastic with a .005” engraving tool on his CNC. There’s a gallery of his work after the break; [Dana]’s portrait is 14000+ dots and took 6 hours, his bosses kids are 16000+ dots and took 4 hours, and [Dana]’s niece is 5500 dots and took 35 minutes. Very awesome work, and now [Dana] has fulfilled a lifelong dream of machining his face.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: May 29, 2012” →

Hackaday Links: May 21, 2012

May 21, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 12 Comments

Turning anything into a touch sensor

Makey Makey is a small board with a USB plug and bunch of contact points for alligator clips. Plug the Makey into your computer and attach just about anything to the contacts, and you can make anything into a video game controller, a keyboard, a piano, or pretty much anything you can imagine. If [Sprite_tm] copied it, you know it has to be cool.

RepRaps will finally cost a million dollars

The Pentagon is throwing money at 3D printers. It’s “only” $60 Million the DoD is putting into 3d printer research, but hopefully our most brilliant researchers will help refine some of the ‘unsolved problems’ – like metal and circuit printing – the 3D printer community is facing.

Getting started with FPGAs

[Tim] found a neat little $40 FPGA board aimed right at the hobby hacker. The good news: It’s compatible with Arduino shields, and it’s very cheap. The bad news: it only has 1280 logic cells, so you probably won’t be emulating CPUs on this thing. If anyone has a teardown / project with this board, send it in.

Improving a Bluetooth dongle with a bit of wire

Unsurprisingly, the extremely cheap Bluetooth dongle [Mike] bought on eBay didn’t have great reception or range. No problem, because you can just replace the internal antenna with a piece of wire cut to length. Now bluetooth devices are recognized instantly, and there are no Bluetooth ‘dead spots’ around [Mike]’s computer.

Come to France, make stuff

The Toulouse Hackerspace is having a little shindig this coming weekend (May 25-27) featuring a conference, workshop, concerts and performances. If you’re in the area, drop on by,

Hackaday Links May 13th 2012

May 13, 2012 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

Amazing ass… for a robot

Yep, Japan still has the creepy robotics market cornered. Case in point is this robotic posterior. Don’t worry, they’ve included a dissection so you can see how the insides work too. [via Gizmodo]

Time-lapse camera module results

As promised, [Quinn Dunki] sent in a link to the photo album from her time lapse camera module. In case you missed it, she built it in a Tic Tac container and stuck it to the side of a racecar.

Kinect controlled killbot

Didn’t we learn anything from RoboCop? We could totally see this Kinect controlled robot (which happens to weigh five tons) going out of control and liquefying an unsuspecting movie extra standing near it. [via Dvice]

Laser popping domino balloons

apparently [Scott] has set a world record by using a laser to pop a line of 100 red balloons. We enjoy seeing the size of the 1W laser that does the popping… it can’t be long now before we get a hold of handheld laser pistols. [via Gizmodo]

Laser balloon targeting

If that last one was a bit of a let down, you might enjoy this automatic targeting system more. The blue triangle shaped icon is setting a target, the amber triangles have already been targeted. Once all the balloons are identified a laser quickly zaps each in order. Quite impressive, although no details have been provided. [Thanks everyone who sent in a link to this]

http://gizmodo.com/5909007/we-hope-lasers-popping-hundreds-of-balloons-is-the-new-dominos-fad

Hackaday Links: May 11, 2012

May 11, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 1 Comment

Three days of work in 5 minutes

[Celso] bought himself a Ultimaker kit and put together a time-lapse video of him putting it together. There’s a lot of work that goes into these machines, but being able to print a nearly perfect cube on the first run is nearly magical.

How about a CNC mill, too?

The folks over at Inventables have put together a tiny CNC mill kit designed from the fruitful mind of [Edward Ford]. The Shapeoko mill is designed around the Makerslide linear bearing system, so you’re getting a lot of precision very easily. Here’s some more info on the Shapeoko

Update the firmware on your RasPi

[Hexxeh] has been playing around with the Linux images for his Raspberry Pi, so he needs to reinstall the firmware on an image quite a lot. He wrote a tool to automate this task, but it should be useful for RasPi users that want to keep kernel and firmware up to date. You can get the rpi-updater at [Hexxeh]’s GitHub.

Your robotic barista is still always on the phone

Zipwhip is a company that provides a bridge from your phone to your computer so text messages can be displayed on your desktop. To show off their tech, they created a text enabled espresso machine. Everything on this robotic barista is automatic: the cups are grabbed from a warming tray with a servo arm, coffee is automatically brewed, and the last three digits of your cell phone number are printed on the foam to identify each cuppa. Check out the video; action starts at 1:30.

Awesome reading material

If you’re looking for something to read on that fancy tablet computer of yours, here’s every issue of New Scientist from 1956 to 1985. The early 60s issues say fusion power plants are about 50 years away, so we should be just fine in a couple of years.

Hackaday Links May 9th 2012

May 9, 2012 by Jeremy Cook 18 Comments

Homecut – CNC Cutting Directory

So you have a CNC machine that you use as a hobby, but would like to do some actual work on the side? Or maybe you have an idea you’d like made. Homecut is a map directory where you can maybe hook up with the right person.

The Curta Mechanical Calculator

As [leehart] mentioned in our comments section, the Curta mechanical calculator is a truly ingenious piece of engineering. A quick Google search should find all kinds of information on it, but this article could be a good place to start for some mechanical hacking inspiration!

Luxman Amplifier DAC Upgrade

[R. Barrios] wasn’t happy with using the sound card for his HTPC setup, so decided to add a DAC module onto his reciever. The resulting audio quality was very good, and the build came out quite clean. Check it out if you’re thinking of a hack-upgrade to your stereo equipment.

3D Printable Tilt-Shift Adapter

A tilt-shift lens a neat piece of equipment that is used to make a large scene look like they were miniatures. It’s a cool effect, but professional lenses to do this can cost thousands of dollars. This Instructable tells you how to go about printing your own. For more info on the technique itself, check out this Wikipedia article.

New 3D Printer on the Block

If you would like to take the plunge into 3D printing, but are looking for somewhere to get a parts kit, the [ORD Bot Hadron 3D Printer] may be worth a look. The build quality looks great, and the price for the mechanical components is quite reasonable at $399. You’ll need to provide the electronics and extruder. Thanks [comptechgeek]!