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Autonomous Cookie Monster

November 10, 2008 by 8 Comments

cookie_monster

[DJ Sures], who built the autonomous Wall-E, is back with another creation. His new autonomous Cookie Monster is certainly an interesting build. He had the cookie monster plush toy already so the first step was to flay the blue beast and insert a skeleton. He used another robot for that. There are two servos for the wheels plus one for each arm and one for the neck. There’s a distance sensor in the mouth. He built a custom board for the PIC18F4685 microcontroller which is running the same 2D mapping code as his previous bot. Check out the video of it in action below. Continue reading “Autonomous Cookie Monster” →

LED Menorahs

November 9, 2008 by 5 Comments

We’re barely past Halloween and people are already working on their next LED based holiday decorations. For Hanukkah, Gizmodo pointed out the PCB menorah pictured above. It uses a set of DIP switches to control which LEDs are lit. A couple years ago, Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories put together a tutorial for building a more minimal LED menorah. Each of the nine LEDs are soldered directly to the legs of an ATtiny2313 microcontroller. Every time you power up the device an additional LED is lit. [Ori] liked the project and decided to take a slightly different approach. He used an LM3914 DIP18 LED bar driver. A potentiometer controls how many of the LEDs are illuminated.

IR Glass Level Detection

November 7, 2008 by 15 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DG3_2lvoL8A]

[Johnny Lee]’s colleague [Paul Dietz] has done some interesting work using interactive tables. He’s specifically researched how to determine how full a drink glass is. In the video above, he’s using Microsoft’s Surface, but this technique should work with any IR camera based multitouch table. Determining the drink level requires custom glassware that has a small prism inside. When the liquid level is above the prism, light passes through, but when it’s below the top it reflects more IR light back into the table. Using this information, restaurant staff could serve drinks in a more efficient manner.

[Paul] has worked on another project that uses RFID and capacitive sensing to a similar effect.

BSoDomizer Blue-screens Your Enemies

November 2, 2008 by 20 Comments

In case you were wondering what industrious hacker [Joe Grand] was doing when he’s not building stuff for Prototype This!, designing Defcon badges, or testifying before congress, it’s this: The BSoDomizer is a VGA pass through device that displays an image of your choice on the victim’s screen. It can do this either periodically or via an IR trigger. The image of choice is a Windows style Blue Screen of Death. It’s powered by a watch battery. The project site has all the schematics you need plus ASCII goatse imagery; you’ve been warned. Embedded below is a demo of the device. We unfortunately didn’t get to see it when it was originally presented during Defcon 16. Continue reading “BSoDomizer Blue-screens Your Enemies” →

How-to: USB Remote Control Receiver

October 30, 2008 by 126 Comments

Now that we listen to MP3s, and watch XVIDs or x264s, a computer is the entertainment center in at least one room of most homes. Unless you have a special HTPC, though, you’re probably stuck using the keyboard to pause, change the volume, and fast-forward through annoying Mythbusters recaps. PC remote control receivers range from ancient serial port designs (who has one?) to USB devices not supported by popular software. In this how-to we design a USB infrared receiver that imitates a common protocol supported by software for Windows, Linux, and Mac. We’ve got a full guide to the protocol plus schematics and a parts list.

Continue reading “How-to: USB Remote Control Receiver” →

E Ink Shows Off The AM300 Developer Kit

October 28, 2008 by 20 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3n2xxqMQyfY]
The AM300 developer’s kit, shown in this video, has some pretty cool new features. It has the ability to show much faster animations than before, as well as having 16 bit gray scale image rendering and pen input. The animations look pretty quick, they mention this being useful for diagrams and advertisements. We just can’t wait to have our newspaper look like its covered with annoying flash banners and animated gifs.