Remote Control Lawn Mower


[Terry] sent in the first of his projects that he’s posted on his site. Having grown up in the midwestern US, I can’t even express how badly I wanted to build one of these puppies when I was a kid. His remote control lawnmower is essentially the bastard child of a three way between a R/C car, a wheelchair and the lawnmower. The radio is interfaced with the control box from a wheelchair, otherwise it’s a good welding project.

Nice work. I’ve one suggestion – a safety circuit that disables the mower if radio control is lost. There are a few devices designed just for R/C projects that’ll do the trick. (Update: ok, there’s a failsafe in the design but I wouldn’t call it optional!)

Modded TI-83 Calculator


[Christopher] sent in his modded TI-83 calculator. (Hit the read link, a bug is broke the one I tried to embed) Besides the uh, racing stripes, he added a PS/2 port (though I see drivers for this mod are up on ticalc.org) and an integrated (cpu controlled) RGB backlight. The backlight is controlled with a programmable AND array that’s slaved off a pair of the CPU I/O lines. Just to top everything off, I poked around and found that you can overclock these puppies, as well as expand their memory. I’m hopeful that wetsanding and varnishing the thing 10 times smoothed out the paintbrush lines, but an inexpensive airbrush would yield much smoother results.

Quickie: Hack-A-Day On G4TV

Thanks to [Ryan Bucshon] for letting me know that Hack-A-Day is up on Attack of the Show tonight. Looks like they’re talking about the Wii Laptop by Ben. Hit it right now.

Update: Excellent, I got mentioned, Hack-A-Day got direct coverage, then they hit Ben’s site, and mentioned Ben’s How-To series on Engadget.

Reactable: Visual, Interactive Synth


[imajes] brought this sweet project to my attention. The table is reactive thanks to the combination of a projector and a video camera below the surface. The position and unique pattern of each block on the table is used to manipulate the operations of the synth. The software is open source – so you can build your own. (And it’ll run on linux, mac and windows) Check out the videos for a good demonstration. I’m thinking that one of these could be built on a budget using lumenlab/overhead LCD technology.