[Bob’s] Experience With Haxlr8r

June 19, 2012 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

[Mike Szczys] recently got together with [Bob Baddeley] to talk about his experiences taking a hobby project to market. He’s not quite there yet, but [Bob] decided to travel a route which we find quite interesting. He has been taking part in a 111 day accelerator program called Haxlr8r. The idea is that this experience will give him the manufacturing chops he needs to meet the demand when his product actually launches. He spent a considerable amount of time in China, an experience he blogged about at length. The program also provides development cash in return for a percentage of the company.

The product he’s working on is an LED scoreboard, which explains why he calls the company Portable Scores. It started as a hobby project, and he brought one of the early prototypes along to show off in the video after the break. It’s a wooden frame, with foam board for the back and substrate, and clear acrylic on the front to protect the LEDs. All of the soldering is point-to point (there’s an image of this available after the break too). His redesigns have moved from Arduino to a PIC controller, made the entire face of the display one PCB, and added Bluetooth control. It’s great to see someone really go for it with a well-conceived project. We wish him all the best!

Continue reading “[Bob’s] Experience With Haxlr8r” →

Blinky Seesaw Has ’em Queuing At The Playground

June 19, 2012 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

How long has it been since you were on a seesaw? Perhaps the plank-and-fulcrum toy of your youth no longer holds any interest. But add some blinky lights and a fancy enclosure and folks are lined up to get back in the saddle.

The video after the break gives just a glimpse of what’s inside of this thing. There are 33 sets of LED strips wrapping the plank from on end to the other. They’re covered in a translucent shell (we’d guess it’s acrylic that has been heated and bent). Judging from the children walking in the middle, it’s engineered well enough to hold up to some abuse. The seesaw can sense a change in orientation and sends light cascading from one end to the other as if aided by gravity.

We really like the clean lines of the installation; the spartan center mount, the use of half a tire as a ground bumper, and fact that the very end of the plank also lights up. If we happened upon this (it’s in Melbourne, Australia so not likely) we’d wait a while for our turn!

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Mini Waterproof LED Lanterns Charge Without Wires

June 19, 2012 by Mike Nathan 23 Comments

inductive-charge-led-lights

If you’re in search of a flashlight that can stand up to the elements, or simply looking for an easy way to spruce up your pool for those hot summer nights, check out these rechargeable PVC LED lights. Inspired by a post in Make: Magazine featuring Indestructible LED Lanterns, [John Duffy] decided to take the project one step further.

While he liked Make’s iteration of the waterproof lantern, he thought it would be best to permanently seal the lights for maximum durability. Not satisfied with a one-use light, he equipped the PVC lanterns with a single rechargeable AA battery, step-up circuitry to drive the LED, and an inductive charging coil.

His floating, waterproof lights sport a slightly bigger footprint than their predecessors to house the extra electronics, but we think that’s more than a fair trade off considering they can be charged wirelessly.

Place your Digikey/Mouser/Jameco orders now and check out [John’s] how-to video – you just might get some of these built in time for the weekend!

[via HackedGadgets]

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Lucid Dreaming Mask Marries Economy With Comfort

June 18, 2012 by Mike Szczys 14 Comments

Here’s an effort to make a cheap lucid dreaming mask that is also comfortable. The idea is in response to the goggles we saw in April (which would not be too comfortable to sleep in) and the wildly successful Remee (which has an $80 target price).

The mask itself is sewn from a child’s fleece blanket. Inside is a piece of foam cut from some recreation mat. You know, those squares made for a play area that connect together like a jigsaw puzzle. You may have already spotted the Arduino in the image above, but the project is designed to run from an AVR chip embedded in the foam. The design only uses three LEDs, which may or may not work for you — we’d guess it depends on how they line up with your eyes. The video after the break does a great job of illustrating each point in the construction.

If you’re looking for something less soothing and more recreational you could always try out these trippy goggles.

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Adding The Apple ‘breathing LED’ To A Motorcycle

June 12, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 32 Comments

[spiralbrain] has a beautiful KTM Duke 200 motorcycle, but he’s found the factory configuration is a little bit plain. Wanting to add his own unique touch to his bike, he decided to add a ‘breathing LED’ to the parking light that slowly changes its brightness much like the LED on recent Macs.

From the factory, [spiralbrain]’s bike uses extremely inefficient (and somewhat ugly) T10 lamps for the parking light. This was changed over to a 12 Volt white SMD light bulb, but what really makes this build special is the way [spiralbrain] is controlling this lamp.

[spiralbrain] added a very tiny circuit consisting of an 8-pin microcontroller (a PIC12F683) that slowly dims the new SMD light bulb using the built-in PWM module. When the bike is taken out of neutral, the microcontroller stops at the highest PWM setting so the ‘breathing’ LED function is only engaged when not moving.

It’s an interesting mod that’s sure to draw some attention when [spiralbrain] is showing off his bike. As a bonus, the mod is completely reversible, so the bike’s warranty is still good.

A Simple RF Signal Strength Meter

June 12, 2012 by Jeremy Cook 18 Comments

[Scott] wrote in to us with his simple, but well done RF signal strength meter. As he points out in his post, sometimes an Arduino is overkill, so a Picaxe 08M was used instead. Apparently this was a refresh of a high school project that he did. Certainly many of us would have liked to go to that high school!

An interesting part of this project is how he used a laser cutter to produce his PCB traces. This was done by applying black paint to the copper on his board and cutting everywhere he didn’t want copper traces. The results were quite good, and should work well when this project is finalized in an enclosure

Check out the video after the break to see this circuit in action. He explains the build in it, but if you just want to see the signal strength lights come on, fast forward to around 2:25. Continue reading “A Simple RF Signal Strength Meter” →

Making A Light Orb Thingy

June 11, 2012 by Caleb Kraft No comments

The “light orb” has become a staple of light painting projects. If you’ve ever looked through someone’s gallery of light painting, you’ve probably seen a few. There are multiple ways to make them, this project focuses on swinging a light, or multiple lights at the end of a rope while you slowly turn in a circle.

The addition of addressable RGB LEDs and a micro controller make this rig capable of generating patterns and possibly even simple images in the sphere itself. His results are quite impressive. His spheres actually look even more precisely shaped than the automated sphere rig we shared with you before!