Brawndo Drinking Fountain – It’s Got What Geeks Crave!

May 17, 2012 by Jeremy Cook 20 Comments

If you’re tired of drinking mere water, like from the toilet, then you should definitely install a Brawndo drinking fountain. Apparently, in addition to being what plants crave, geeks also enjoy this futuristic beverage.

As with many hacks, this fountain started out with a broken piece of equipment – a water fountain. After searching unsuccessfully for a new pushbutton valve [Dave] and [Craig] decided to use a solenoid valve instead. Logically, they decided that if a new valve was needed, some new features to go along with it were also needed. Along with this valve, a peristalsis pump was installed to add flavoring to the water if Brawndo was selected (as opposed to toilet water).

The hack was finished off with some nice decals and a switch plate. As you may have suspected, the Brawndo fountain was custom made for a makerspace. In this case Kansas City’s own Hammerspace. Be sure to check them out if you’re in the area!

Tron Costume Fits Nice And Snug

May 17, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 12 Comments

We’ve seen our fair share of Tron costumes and props, but much like [Sean-h] points out, they are usually pretty bulky and baggy. He’s gone a slightly different route by starting with a wetsuit instead of bulkier items like leather jackets. The lighting is done in the same manner we’ve seen before, copious amounts of EL wire and EL tape. The additional layers of this costume were made from foam, so they could be fairly form fitting as well.

[Sean-h] points out that there are some downfalls to his design. The wetsuit, while looking great, gets pretty hot while indoors and the foam layers have a tendency to detach if you move around too much. We think it looks great though. Good job [Sean-H]

Building A Sound Reactive EL Panel And Learning Something In The Process

May 15, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 7 Comments

We’ve seen a lot of builds using electroluminescent wire, usually in the realm of costumes and props. Unfortunately, most electrical engineers don’t deal with blinking and dimming EL wire and panels and any tinkerer trying to control electroluminescence doesn’t have a lot of resources on how to control EL stuff. [ch00f] wanted to fill this knowledge gap, so he build a sound reactive EL panel driver and learned a lot in the process.

Nobody really knows how electroluminescent wire and panels work on a molecular level, but [ch00f] did know that changing the direction of an electric field will cause the EL material to glow. Changing the frequency of this electric field will change the EL material’s brightness, so all [ch00f] had to do was make a variable-frequency EL driver – something that’s a lot harder than it sounds.

We won’t bore you with the details because we couldn’t do [ch00f]’s write up any justice. We will skip to the end and tell you [ch00f] was able to make a sound reactive EL panel after a month of work that included making his own transformers and doing a whole bunch of math. You can check out the video of [ch00f]’s [Tony Stark]-esque EL panel after the break.

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I Build Stuff Too! Fire Cannon Edition

May 15, 2012 by Jesse Congdon 6 Comments

After hanging around festivals and burners for a bit I decided that it was finally time to show my stuff and actually build one of these crazy fire cannons everyone is always talking about. The easiest way to go about this would have been to just follow plans from any given website: replace the valve from an empty grill tank with a 4 way fitting, add an electric solenoid, barrel, low pressure regulator (for the pilot), and then pipe in a regulated propane source. Easy. ~~The problem~~ My problem with this stock fire cannon design is that it looks like every other fire cannon out there, you have your off the shelf propane bottle and a long thin copper barrel poking up from it, the fire is nice but the cannon is not very fun to look at. Also you can only fit a given size valve, and that does not allow for very much fuel to be released at once. This limits the size of the plume of fire, and where is the fun in that. The central idea is to add lots of little bottles instead of one big one; I stumbled on a nice pretty anodized aluminum water manifold and the idea grew out from there.

Now, keep in mind I did not just set out to build this crazy thing out of nowhere and slap everything together without laying out some plans. I have been working with the folks over at Frank’s Kitchens for some time, and have been able to pick up a lot of safety practices and general safe handling procedure to keep myself from burning down the entire county. If you want to set out to make a flame effect that is great, but just read up on safety first and try to check out a fire cannon in person… That’s what I did and I still have most of my eyebrows as a result (no arm hair though).

Enough freaking text. Check out the video below for a tour!

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Hacking Magnets Into Your Skin

May 13, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 79 Comments

[Dave] loved his iPod nano so much that he implanted 4 magnets in his arm to hold it.

Ok, go ahead and shout “fanboy” at your screen and say something snide about apples products or lament the poor working conditions at foxconn. Got it out of your system? Cool.

Actually, if we had to guess, [Dave] really isn’t doing this all for his love of the device or the company. It is much more likely that he is just really into body modding and this was a convenient theme for a mod. We find the idea pretty interesting. We’ve seen implants before, but they are usually of the RFID type. Typically those are used for some kind of security or computer control.

Implanting a magnet, however, is interesting because it could almost give you a “sixth sense” You could detect what was magnetic, and how magnetic it was. If we were going to do something like this, we would probably go fully sub-dermal though to help avoid infection.

What other kind of implants could you realistically do with today’s technology to give yourself other senses?

Wireless IPod Charger Built From Scratch

May 10, 2012 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

Despite the obvious use of a lot of wire, this project is actually a wireless charging system. [Jared] built it as a way to explore the concepts behind transferring power inductively. Alternating current on one of the white coils induces current on the other. This is then rectified, and regulated for use as a 5V charger. In this case it powers his iPod, but any USB device should work with the setup.

The transmitter uses the power supply from an old laptop as a source. Some filtering and a couple of MOSFETS are responsible for generating the AC current on the transmitting coil. The receiving coil feeds the bridge rectifier. In the writeup that voltage is fed to a 7805 regulator to provide a stable 5V output. However, in the video demo after the break [Jared] shows off the boost converter that he uses on his improved circuit. This way if the voltage drops due to poor alignment of the coils it will still be able to provide a steady output.

We’ve seen the same coil concept used to add wireless charging to cellphones too.

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You Might Be A Geeky Dad If: Your Kids Practice Spelling In Morse Code

May 8, 2012 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

Kids learn better if they’re engaged in the topic at hand. [Todd] found something that has his son just begging to practice his spelling words each night. He converts them all to Morse code and taps each out on the Morse code practice station they built together. To start off Todd connected the keyer to his Fluke 87 meter, using the continuity tester to sound a beep each time the key is depressed. But this is just a temporary setup until [Todd] could help guide his young one through some circuit design and assembly.

The replacement is based on a 555 timer. They grabbed an electronics project book and found the schematic along with a Morse code primer. With parts in hand [Todd] films as his son hones his soldering skills with each connection. The finished project uses the timer chip to produce the audio frequency heard from the on-board speaker. If you’ve never had the joy of teaching a kid how to solder, you’re going to love seeing the video.

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