Giant Space Invaders With Road Barriers And No Moving Parts

April 26, 2012 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

This is space invaders on the large-scale. To give you an idea of just how big this is, that’s a street lamp to the left. It’s being played on the side of a building, but it’s not really done the easy way. We’ve seen gaming on the sides of buildings by using projectors, but this one is more like a classic LCD handheld game… just really really big.

Each of the game pieces is hung in place on a black backdrop. The invaders themselves are molded-plastic road construction barricades. The shield area on the bottom is made op of center-lane dividers. All of the pieces are wired with lights that can be addressed by a central controller. As you can see after the break, just one button gets the action under way.

This is along the same line as the Christmas Light game we saw several years back. If you’ve got some extra strings of lights and don’t mind building a controller we think you should add a little fun to the neighborhood with your own giant installation. Just don’t forget to send in some pictures.

Continue reading “Giant Space Invaders With Road Barriers And No Moving Parts” →

Pong, An Engine, And Bond Theme (oh My!)

April 24, 2012 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

Hopefully you’re not on a network that blocks YouTube, because we’re sharing videos that show off three different projects. Alas, they don’t give any details about the development process, but we think you’ll like seeing the end results just the same.

First up is a Stirling engine. This one is pretty serious business, with machined parts making up the alcohol-lamp powered engine [Thanks Pete]. This is much more elegant than the tuna can version from last month.

Bust out your Arduino and give theoriginal video game a go. This game of Pong is played on an oscilloscope using two micro-trimpots. To make it happen a pair of MCP4901 DAC chips are feeding the probes.

While you’ve got that friendly blue breakout board out, might as well grab a set of old foppy drives. Here is an eight-channel version of the James Bond theme [via Technabob]. Unlike the sampler from the other week, this one uses the stepper motor noise to create sweet music.

Stop Motion Animation Creation

April 23, 2012 by Jeremy Cook 4 Comments

Stop Motion Animation has always been interesting to me since I “discovered” that one could make animated flip books by drawing each frame a little different. Fast forward 20 years or so, and computer technology has gotten to the point where this sort of thing can be done electronically quite easily and at an incredibly low price of a camera, computer, and free or paid-for software (here’s the technique using GIMP, a free, good quality photo editing tool) to put everything together.

The frames in the picture above are of my latest [PVC man] animation, which can be made with some electroluminescent lights, gloves, and some PVC pipe. Each frame was individually photographed, and after several hours of work we had enough footage for 17 seconds of so of stop-motion animation.

Although by no means perfect, the quality of these animations has gone up dramatically from the first animations that I made using an old ENV2 camera phone. Although I was using a “custom mount” for it, it’s amazing these came out as well as they did. As with everything hacking related, this process is a constant work in progress. Check out the videos after the break for the [PVC man] video as well as one of the early ENV2-produced stop-motion shorts!

Continue reading “Stop Motion Animation Creation” →

Slow Motion Destruction Of Random Things

April 22, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 21 Comments

Though we can’t really tell you how this is hacking related, we’ve always shared random videos of stuff getting destroyed with you. Invariably someone in the comments goes on a rant about how wasteful and/or dangerous it is. This clip, from a Danish TV show called Stupid and Dangerous, fits that description quite well. It is also freaking awesome.

We’re really not sure what draws us to these videos exactly. Is it vicarious destruction or possibly our natural affinity for slow motion?

[via Dvice]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUZ-e2SkeMI

DCPU-16 Running Pac-Man

April 20, 2012 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

If you’ve been trying to think of stuff you can do with the DCPU-16 this may inspire you to write a clone of a classic game.

This version of Pac-Man was written using a sprite system with a 16 color pallette. It runs in an HTML-based emulator, so you can even monkey around with the assembly code to help you figure out how it works. But if you’re not into writing code that is this machine-close, you can just click the ‘run’ button and use your keyboard arrows to play through a level or two. You’ll notice there’s only one game board available so far and some things are still missing like that familiar waka-waka as he gobbles up the dots. Let us know if you mange to extend the features of this version.

In case you missed it, this emulator is running the DCPU-16 spec from Notch’s new game, 0x10c (. We have no idea how that’s going to shape up, but getting in on the game early will pay off it turns out to be as popular as Minecraft.

Badges? We Don’t Need No Stinking Badges!

April 19, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 5 Comments

In a an obvious marketing move akin to a drug dealer offering up free samples, Urban threads is offering free badge plans for hackerspaces that have robotic embroidery machines. We’ve seen this trend of badges coming up lately and we don’t know if it is the boy/girl scout in us, or the punk rocker that makes us pine for them. You may laugh, but look at that skull with the welding goggles on. If you don’t think that’s badass… then we disagree.

The idea of giving some away free isn’t new. You can download free photoshop brushes, free fonts, free circuits and all kinds of other free stuff from sites that sell better versions as well. We just couldn’t pass up the chance to point out that skull, and helping out hackerspaces is always good in our eyes. So, who has one of those embroidery machines?

Improving A Freestyle Kayak

April 19, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 10 Comments

When [Andrea] was looking for a freestyle kayak, he bought the cheap version of a high-end kayak. The hull is exactly the same as the high-end model, but to differentiate between product lines, Pyranha chose to use less expensive fittings. [Andrea] decided to bring his new kayak up to spec (Italian, here’s a Google translation) by fixing the problems in the cheaper model by bringing it up to more professional standards.

When [Andrea] got a hold of his kayak, the back rest was held on by a piece of nylon webbing secured with a plastic clamp. This was bound to fail after just a few outings, so he fixed this with a few steel nuts and bolts. The eyelets used to tie ropes to the kayak were terrible, so with a little bit of nylon webbing and a pair of buckles these were replaced.

Now, [Andrea] has a very nice kayak indeed, for less than the price of the more expensive version. Good job, [Andrea].