Misc Hacks

4135 Articles

Built-in Coffee Table Lightbox

January 16, 2014 by 9 Comments

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[Flyingpuppy] sent us this tip about her cleverly-concealed pull-out lightbox drawer. Her resolution for the new year was to make more art, so she filled this coffee table with art supplies and decided she’d draw while relaxing in front of the television. She also wanted a lightbox nearby, which originally involved hacking the entire tabletop with some acrylic, but she eventually opted for a simpler build: and it’s portable, too! The drawer’s lights are battery-powered, so you can pull the entire thing out of the table and drag it onto your lap, if that makes drawing more comfortable.

[Flyingpuppy] sourced seven inexpensive LED units from her local dollar store, which she mounted to the back of the drawer with some screws. The rest of the drawer was lined with white foam board, the bottom section angled to bounce light up onto the acrylic drawing surface. Because she needs to open the case to manually flip on the lights, she secured the acrylic top magnetically, gluing a magnet to the underside of the foam board and affixing a small piece of steel to the acrylic. A simple tug on the steel bit frees the surface, providing access underneath. Stick around for a video below.

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Lux: A 100% Open Source Camera

January 15, 2014 by 29 Comments

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[Kevin Kadooka] recently finished his open source camera. The Lux Camera is 100% open source. Lux uses no parts from other cameras – not even a lens! To date we’ve only seen this with achieved with pinhole cameras. [Kevin] isn’t new to camera hacking. He was the man behind the Duo camera, which had a successful Kickstarter campaign in February of 2013. Duo is a DIY camera, but it still required lenses from Mamiya-Sekor, and a shutter from Seiko. Lux is a different animal. It has a manual focus 65mm f/5.6 Single Element lens. The shutter is [Kevin’s] own solenoid based leaf shutter design. Just as in the original shutter, an Arduino controls shutter operation and timing.

The main camera body and many of its parts are 3D printed. [Kevin] got some very nice quality parts from Shapeways 3D printing service. We have to say that some of the assemblies look a bit complex for desktop printers. However since everything is open source, anyone willing to put the time in could adapt them for the average RepRap or Ultimaker. [Kevin] has posted detailed build photos, as well as some photos taken with the Lux on his flickr stream. The pictures have  a decidedly holga-esque look to them, due in part to the single element lens. Even with this limitation, we love the idea of having a brownie style camera built completely from scratch.

Copper Etching: Not Just For PCBs

January 13, 2014 by 29 Comments

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[Morag Hickman] is an artist who makes use of ferric chloride for something other than etching a PCB. She uses the process to etch beautiful designs into her jewelry.

[Tortoise Butler] is a small film crew that created this three and a half minute film on the art of etching copper, and it is an absolute pleasure to watch. There are no computers, no toner transfers, and she doesn’t even etch on a flat surface. It’s an excellent example of doing something different — why not add etching to finish off a project? If you’ve already done PCBs, it can’t be that hard to do a logo instead!

Anyway, it’s been a while since we’ve shared a handmade hack, and we think this is a great example that deserves the spotlight. Don’t forget to send in your own handmade projects to the tips line!

Stick around after the break to enjoy the film — we recommend watching it full screen and in HD.

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I Am The Midnight Message Board What Messages At Midnight

January 11, 2014 by 15 Comments

Photoluminescent stars on your bedroom wall or ceiling are pretty cool, though the stationary shapes can become boring. [Adi] felt this way, too. While doodling with a bright white light on some glow in the dark vinyl, it occurred to him that this could make for an interesting display. He set about making GLO, the midnight message board and RSS display.

[Adi]’s light writer uses 12 UV LEDs on a linear axis powered by a stepper motor to write RSS headlines, Twitter trends, or custom text on his wall. He finds the slow fade of the text very soothing to fall asleep by, and it’s easy to see why. The LED array imprints a section of a character consisting of a 6×5 bit pattern. The 12 LEDs are split into two groups, so it can write two lines at 45-50 characters each. [Adi] designed his own pixel font for this project, and advises that only upper case letter forms be used.

[Adi]’s write-up is quite admirable and comprehensive. In the circuit build section, he advises that the LEDs must be very close to the vinyl for optimum results, but that they should protrude farther than the shift registers so the chips don’t rub the vinyl. Of course you could opt for more intense light sources, like laser. See it in action after the break.

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Teaching Mario To Play Pong And Snake Through Innumerable Exploits

January 10, 2014 by 30 Comments

This is the coolest classic Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) hack we’ve seen in quite a while. What you’re seeing is called “Super Mario World (Total Control)” by [Masterjun]. Our first recommendation is that you watch the video, then come back here for an explanation. Similar to what we saw for Pokemon Yellow on Gameboy, [Masterjun] created entire Pong and Snake clones within Super Mario World. He also created a menu and ending screen, along with his trademark smiley face graphic. Even more amazing is that this was unveiled live on a real SNES running an unmodified game cartridge. [Masterjun] actually used dual multitap cables, effectively connecting 8 controllers to a SNES. This gave him enough bandwidth to quickly download his new binary through the controller ports alone.

Welcome to the world of Tool Assisted Speedruns (TAS), where emulators and scripts are used to create high-speed runs through video games. The runners often work frame by frame, painstakingly inputting commands to create the perfect run. Game bugs and glitches are often exploited in these speed runs. In fact, in runs such as this one, the speed run takes second place to showing off the exploit. The output of speed run creation is a script file of control inputs which can be executed on an emulator to “re-run” the TAS at any time. This script can also be saved to a PC or Raspberry Pi and played back into the controller port of a real game system. A PIC based hardware translator is used to convert the data to NES or SNES controller format. As one might expect, these scripts run open loop. With no feedback from the running game, they can and do become desynchronized due to differences in console hardware, such as the tolerance of the oscillator crystal. When everything is in sync and does work , the results are awesome.

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A Business Card That Plays Simon Says

January 10, 2014 by 16 Comments

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When your name is Simon and you want to build your own circuit board business card, it makes perfect sense to incorporate a game of Simon Says, and that’s exactly what [Simon] did with his Business Card.

You may see a resemblance to the Engineer’s Emergency Business Card; that’s because [Simon] took inspiration from that card to build his own.  The game of Simon Says is played via 4 low-profile pushbuttons and 4 0805 LEDs.  The microcontroller of choice to run the game is an ATtiny45 set up to work with the Arduino IDE.  But with only 5 pins available for I/O, [Simon] had to give up 4 pins to the LEDs and configure the remaining pin as an analog input.  The buttons are tied into a voltage divider that feeds the analog input, so depending which button is pressed, a different voltage is read in, thus a value from 0 to 1023 determines which button was pressed.

One of the great things about this write-up is that it goes through the process of etching PCBs at home using the toner-transfer method.  We’re not sure how many home-etched business cards he’s willing to pass out, but surely whoever does get the card, will never forget his name.

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3D Bubble Display

January 9, 2014 by 14 Comments

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[Craig Shultz], a mechatronics grad student at Northwestern University, sent us a video of his group’s project from last winter: a 3D bubble display. We’ve seen some pretty impressive and innovative bubble displays around here—most recently the 60-tube RGB LED build—but [Craig’s] is the first we’ve seen that adds some depth to the project.

For the most part, its construction is what you’d expect: an acrylic case enclosing the 4×4 arrangement of tubes, 16 valves 16 individually controlled solenoids, and some small air pumps; all driven by a PIC microcontroller. In the video, however, you’ll have to strain your eyes if you want to see the tubes, which is a clever design choice on [Craig’s] part to showcase the display’s depth. Each of the bubbles was visually separated by pairing glycerin with a tubing material that had a similar index of refraction, Pyrex. As a result, the tubes blend seamlessly into the fluid. Check out the video after the break.

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