Misc Hacks

4179 Articles

Maker Faire 2009

May 29, 2009 by 11 Comments

jinroh

Maker Faire returns to the San Francisco Bay Area this weekend. It’s “the World’s Largest DIY Festival”. We’ve been attending off and on since 2006 and you’re sure to catch many of the projects we’ve covered in the past. Be sure to stop by our favorite hackers that will be in attendance: mightyOhm, macetech, SparkFun, Liquidware, Jeri Ellsworth, Bleep Labs, Noisebridge, Ani Niow, EMSL, and Adafruit. If you’re attending, upload your photos to the Hack a Day Flickr pool and let us know what you see.

[photo: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid]

1964 300baud Modem Surfs The Web

May 27, 2009 by 105 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9dpXHnJXaE]

[phreakmonkey] got his hands on a great piece of old tech. It’s a 1964 Livermore Data Systems Model A Acoustic Coupler Modem. He recieved it in 1989 and recently decided to see if it would actually work. It took some digging to find a proper D25 adapter and even then the original serial adapter wasn’t working because the oscillator depends on the serial voltage. He dials in and connects at 300baud. Then logs into a remote system and fires up lynx to load Wikipedia. Lucky for [phreakmonkey] they managed to decide on a modulation standard in 1962. It’s still amazing to see this machine working 45 years later. He’d love to hear from you if you’ve used a similar device.

[via Waxy]

Nerf Sentry Gun With Image Recognition

May 17, 2009 by 45 Comments

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

Here’s another hacked Nerf Vulcan rifle. This time it is an automated sentry gun. You must present it your badge, if no badge is found, you are assaulted with a fiery storm of small nerf darts. All encounters are logged and a photos are kept. This was a final project at Cornell, and for once it wasn’t ECE.  This was for CS1114. They did a pretty good job with the tracking, now they need to add some more interesting voice options to it.

Massive Etch A Sketch From TV Screen

May 13, 2009 by 32 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mhu3zojL5Y4]

[Jeri] put together an absolutely massive Etch A Sketch for The FatMan and Circuit Girl show. She had removed the DLP chip from an HD rear projection TV and decided to repurpose the 52inch screen. The movement mechanism uses pulleys from screen doors with nylon lines. The two sets of lines are fed in a criss cross pattern so that the parallel lines move in the same direction. The lines move tent poles in the x and y which controls the movements of the golf tee stylus. It’s driven by two high torque motors from $9 Harbor Freight 18V drills. They tried several different powders, but ended up using aluminum powder from an original Etch A Sketch because it sticks to everything. It will eventually be hooked up for IRC bot control once they get a large enough h-bridge.

[via adafruit]

Home Made R/C System

May 9, 2009 by 23 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HI3KNy9GKB8]

[dunk] sent his home made Radio Control system. It is constructed from a Playstation 2 controller, an Atmega 2561, microcontroller, some RF modules and various servos and motors. It seems to work pretty well. You can get all the schematics and source code on his site. Several people have submitted a similar project which involves an iPhone and a helicopter, but that one is a bit dubious, mainly due to it’s lack of detail.