Floppy Disk Augmented Reality Is A Head-scratcher

March 23, 2010 by Mike Szczys 23 Comments

[Iain Gildea] tipped us off about a drill-powered coffee grinder he made but it was the floppy-disc augmented reality display a few paragraphs down that caught our attention. He’s taken 36 white floppy discs, sprayed one side black, then mounted them each with a center pivot into a 6×6 grid. Through a convoluted system of pulleys and servo motors the display can be manipulated to produce augmented reality markers. After the break you can see the display itself, then the result of viewing it through a webcam.

We’re amused, but also scratching our heads. There must be an easier way, such as a light-up grid covered in dark plexi or something along those lines. But then again, it’s his hack and he can do what he wants… and he seems to have a thing for floppies.

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1-Wire LAN With An LCD

March 23, 2010 by Jakob Griffith 14 Comments

[Viktor], one of our favorite avid hackers, has been playing around with 1-wire systems all this month. What started out as a MicroLAN Fonera has turned into an iButton interface, to a 1-wire powered hub, and finally a 1-wire character driven LCD. Anyone looking at 1-wire systems or OWFS could surely benefit from his testing.

However, if you still haven’t gotten your fill of 1-wire goodness, let us remind you of the 1-wire HVAC and IPv6 to 1-wire protocol translator.

[Thanks Juan]

Flip-book Style Digitization

March 19, 2010 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCOXC5PTJj8]

This method of book digitization allows you to scan an entire book by fanning through the pages. It uses a high-speed camera that captures 500 frames per second to get a good look at each page. Processing software isolates each pages, analyzes any curve in the paper due to the flipping, and smooths out the image for better optical character recognition results. The greatly reduces the time it takes to digitize a book, even compared to setups that automatically flip pages.

[Thanks Erico]

Ditch The LPs And Build Your Own 3D Scanner

March 18, 2010 by Mike Szczys 22 Comments

Find yourself an old record player, a laser level, and a digital scanner and you can build a 3D scanner. That’s what [Rob] did. The camera and laser level are mounted on the turntable for steady rotation. The camera captures the vertical laser line traveling around the room by recording 30 fps at a resolution of 640×480. This data is then translated into a Blender 3D file via a Python script and the Python Image Library. You can scan a whole room or just a small object. The face above is the result of this image capture after a bit of processing. [Rob] found this worked best in the dark and when scanning surfaces that are not reflective.

Make sure you also check out the camera-and-projector scanning method.

JeeNode Development Platform

March 15, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 15 Comments

It is basically a nice compact layout for an Atmel Atmega 328 with a wireless module. Fully compatible with the Arduino IDE. The JeeNode is available in kit form, but also all schematics and CAD files are available to download. It looks like they are mainly using it for home monitoring and control. So far we’ve seen them put a temp sensor, power metering, and IR LED modules on their flickr set.

Storage For Your Hacking Needs

March 14, 2010 by Jakob Griffith 18 Comments

Sometimes your project needs a lot of non-volatile ROM, right on cue [Matthew] let us know how to not only connect, interface, read, and write to SD cards with a PIC over serial, but also how to do the above mentioned with an old PATA HDD. For those without a PIC/serial connection don’t fret, [nada] let us know about his Bus Pirate SD card hack, of which our personal favorite part is the creative use of an old 5.25″ floppy connector as the SD card socket.

Monocle Fixes Webcam Farsightedness

March 3, 2010 by Mike Szczys 36 Comments

[Vik Oliver] came up with a webcam focus fix that is so quick and simple we never would have thought of it. He received the webcam as a gift and mounted on an articulated lamp so that it could easily be positioned around his projects. The problem is the camera lacks a focus adjustment so the close-up shots were blurry.

In what we consider a eureka moment, he sourced a pair of dollar store reading glasses to fix the optics. The glasses came with their own mounting bracket. He clipped them in half and wrapped the wire ear support around the camera body. Great hacks don’t have to be complicated, and we need to do a better job of looking at the dollar store for project parts!