Adaptive Technology Used To Fly An IR Helicopter

February 4, 2013 by Mike Szczys 1 Comment

adaptive-tech-controlled-helicopter

This gentleman is using electrical impulses from his neck muscles to fly a toy helicopter around the room. The project is a demonstration of the AsTeRICS project which seeks to reduce the complexity of adapting the set of skills a disabled person can use to do a wide range of functions. In this case, controlling the helicopter could easily be switched to other tasks without changing the user interface hardware.

One of the plugins for the AsTeRICS project uses the OpenEEG library. This reads the signals coming from a pair of electrodes on top of each shoulder. In the video after the break you can see that as he flexes these muscles the changes in signal are mapped to the altitude of the helicopter. This is just one example of a wide range of inputs that include things like building a webcam-based mouse or using facial recognition.

The toy itself is being driven by an Arduino sending IR commands. We’ve seen quite a few project where the helicopter communications protocols are laid bare.

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Glowing Super Bowl Helmets

February 2, 2013 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

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These geeky Superbowl decorations glow thanks to the EL panel hack which [Becky Stern] created. It’s almost impossible to make out in this image, but the EL panels have been applied to the surface of the helmet. On the San Francisco helmet you can just make out the black connector and cord at the bottom of the F.

El panels are a lot like EL wire (but they’re flat) in that the phosphors are excited when connected to a high voltage AC supply. You can cut the panels into shapes without a problem. The technique used here is to create a black vinyl mask to go over the top of the panel. This makes cutting the panel a lot easier.

The mask sticker is made on a vinyl cutter. [Becky] is a master at using the vector tool as you can see in the video after the break. She outlined each team logo with paths to create a file which the cutter can use. From there it took several tries to get the sticker just right as the curve of the helmet distorts the logos just a bit. Once it was dialed in she stuck the vinyl on the El panel and cut around the perimeter.

The Adafruit team sure loves to use electroluminescent accents.

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Populate SMD Boads Using A Toothpick And Tweezers

February 1, 2013 by Mike Szczys 25 Comments

Here’s a demonstration which proves you don’t really need special tools to populate a surface mount PCB. We’ve seen this board before, it’s the glass PCB server which [Cnlohr] developed and demonstrated by connecting the real world to Minecraft. It’s a tiny board and we were happy to have the chance to see his method for populating the parts before reflow soldering.

In the video after the break [Cnlohr] starts by dispensing a glob of solder pasted from its storage container. He mentions that as long as you store the stuff in the refrigerator it’s rather easy to work with. Because most of his projects are single boards it’s not worth it to have a solder stencil produced. Instead he picks up a bit of the solder glob on the end of a toothpick and applies it to each pad.

This isn’t really as bad as it sounds. The fine pitch TQFP footprints can just be dragged with a bit of the paste. After this application — which took around seven minutes — he grabs some tweezers (not the vacuum type) and begins placing each component. If he missed some paste he’ll discover it in this step and add where necessary. The last step is a trip through his toaster oven.

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Modulator Box Connects IPod To Tesla Coil

January 30, 2013 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

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This pass through audio modulator lets you playback stereo audio on two Tesla coils. But don’t fret, you can just use mono files if you only have one coil on hand. On one side there are inputs that connect to the audio source. The other side drives the Tesla coil, switching it on and off based on the relationship between a reference voltage and the audio signal. As you can hear in the video after the break this sounds great as long as you have the right kind of source audio.

The song played in that clip is the Duke Nukem 3D theme. [Daniel] started with a MIDI file and removed the chimes and drums to make the playback a little cleaner. The demo uses just one coil because the other was destroyed during testing when feedback between the two became a problem.

For some reason this reminds us of that singing Tesla coil hat. If you’re already on our mailing list (sign up in the sidebar) you know we’re getting pretty close to unveiling our own awesome Tesla coil project. It doesn’t sing… yet.

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MIT Media Lab’s Month In Shenzhen

January 30, 2013 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

When you’ve got a month worth of blog postings it’s pretty difficult to choose one photograph that sums it all up. This one shows the tour group from MIT Media Lab in ESD garb ready for their tour of Okano SMT and Speaker Factory. It was part of a tour of Shenzhen aimed at bringing graduate students up to speed on what it means to manufacture products in the city. Luckily, Freaklabs member [Akiba] was one of the staff members of the program and blogged extensively about the experience. At first glance his page full of post abstracts looks really boring, but click through because both his recount and the commented images associated with each day are fun and fascinating ways to tag along with the group.

If you’re really good with faces you can pick [Bunnie Huang] out of the lineup above (he’s the third from the right). He had the original idea for the program and brought aboard a few others to help make the thing a success. The group toured a wide range of factories and parts markets in the city. This included your traditional electronics manufacturing venues but there was even a side trip to a diaper and feminine napkin plant to see the non-electronic factories in operation. In addition to tours there were lectures by industry members like HAXLR8R, a group that specializes in helping start-ups navigate the manufacturing jungle.

Hand Bind Your Own Books

January 29, 2013 by Mike Szczys 21 Comments

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This guide will show you how to bind books by hand. The process from start to finish isn’t very difficult as long as you follow each step along the way. The final product looks great, and we can’t think of a better gift… as long as you have something meaningful on the pages.

We never really thought about the direction of the fibers in a sheet of paper, but that’s the first thing you’ll have to take into consideration here. You want the fibers running up and down when the book is in a bookcase. Next the sheets are organized into stacks of four, then folded in half forming eight pages. After stacking these packets together a series of lines are marked on the folded side. Holes are then punched from the inside at each mark using a sturdy needle. This is where the stitching for the binding will happen. Bands are added using coarse linen thread. After stitching these in place and knotting, glue is added and finally a piece of cloth is adhered to the binding and a portion of each inside cover. From there it’s onto fabricating the cover before pressing the finished project as seen above. What a piece of work!

[via Reddit]

Iron Man Faux Stained Glass Saves $4k

January 25, 2013 by Mike Szczys 28 Comments

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Check out how the light hits this piece of artwork. It’s a very convincing piece of stained glass… except it’s fake. [Sdtacoma] figured out a way to mimic stained glass using a single pane. The inspiration for the project came after seeing a real stained glass panel featuring Iron Man which was available on Etsy for $4500.

Due to popular demand [Sdtacoma] posted an album of the technique he used. Starting with some art found online he made it black and white, blew it up to size (this thing’s about five feet tall) and used posterizer to print it out using multiple sheets of paper.

The frame and pane were found at a recycled building goods store. After cleaning it up he used the paper template to lay out the dividing lines between different colored sections using Liquid Lead. The product had dimension to it (kind of like puffy paint for fabrics) which looks like the lead tracks between panes of stained glass. Once dry the color was added using an eye dropper to apply glass paint.