Don’t be ashamed, we suck at air hockey too. Luckily for us, we now have a robot opponent to blame or losing streak on. Engineers at Nuvation didn’t build this air hockey playing robot, they simply adapted a standard industrial robot arm for the task. It is controlled jointly by a ColdFire processor and a 9S08 microcontroller. An array of high power LEDs and a camera are positioned over the air hockey table, which captures the position of the puck. The robot reportedly wins 90% of its games, even against solid opponents. While this is more of project to show the power of ColdFire processors, we can’t help but think it will lead to a rash of unbeatable robot opponents. We’ve already been robo-owned at foosball; what’s next?
Misc Hacks4191 Articles
High Tech Coffee Tables
Time was, coffee tables were good for three things only: setting down your coffee, setting down your coffee table books, and maybe putting your feet up. To combat this perception, Born Rich has posted their top ten list of high tech coffee tables that are capable of these things and more.
Non-destructive Breakdown Voltage Tester
This applies more to older vacuum technology than your average solid state hardware, but [Richard] put together an interesting project. It’s designed to test a component for its breakdown voltage without destroying it. The general idea of the ‘BVT’ is to increase the voltage applied to a device until some current leakage is detected. Of course, any device that includes notes on probable arc length in relation to kilovolts is awesome by definition.
Turn Signal Jacket How-to
[Leah Buechley], whose work we’ve been covering since way back when, has built this lovely turn signal jacket. The project photos were posted in March, but she’s just added a well illustrated project guide. The jacket is based around a LilyPad Arduino, a lightweight Arduino board with radial pads designed to be used in wearable projects. You make your connections by sewing conductive thread through the pads. The how-to covers attaching the LilyPad parts properly and then insulating the wires with fabric paint after you’ve verified they work.
The guide has an interesting discussion about placing the power supply. The 4-ply silver coated thread used has a resistance of approximately 14ohms/foot. So, if you place the power supply one foot from the LilyPad, the two wires combine for 28ohms, causing a 1.4V drop. The power supply is only 5V, which means the LilyPad will be 3.6V. A voltage of 3.3V will cause the Arduino to reset. If your resistance is too high, you’ll have to add more thread.
The power supply on this jacket is under the collar. Each cuff has a single button plus an LED. The button will make the jacket flash the direction for 15 seconds (also indicated on the sleeve LED). If you press both buttons at the same time, it switches to night mode by flashing both directions at the same time to make you more visible.
Rear View Jacket
Is your popped collar so epic it emulates horse blinders? Are punk teens always skitching your coattails? Are you constantly moonwalking into power poles, trash cans, and the elderly? [Paul Coudamy]’s Hard-Wear Jacket solves all of these problems. It has a micro-camera embedded in the back of the neck and streams live video to a sleeve mounted monitor. The goal is to expand the perception of the wearer and how they interact with the environment. We know this is just a small step and doubt many people will be scrambling to never turn their neck again. It’s something interesting to contemplate though: how will people behave when brain taps allow their peripheral vision to have the same clarity as normal vision?
[via Gizmodo]
Free Web Development Tools
OStatic has a collected some great free tools for web developers. We talked about Quanta in an earlier post, but this article reaches beyond just HTML editors. LaunchSplash can be used to generate splash pages while you build. IBM, responsible for the Eclipse IDE, has built Project Zero to encourage web app development; even the IDE is web based. OpenX is an open ad server. Piwik is a free web analytics package. There are also quite a few open source CMS’s and sites collecting open source designs.
3x3x3 LED Cube
[portreathbeach] built this simple 3x3x3 LED matrix. It uses a PIC16F690 in a ZIF socket for the brains. Each layer has nine LEDs with the cathodes tied together. The anodes from each LED are connected to the LED below. The LEDs are multiplexed so that even though all layers appear to be on, they’re being addressed individually. He’s included software, so you can build your own animations. Video of the matrix in motion is after the break.
