The Minotaur’s Revenge: Dueling Labyrinths

July 28, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 7 Comments

In case you hadn’t noticed, we participated in a contest recently. The RedBull Creation contest. The basic idea was that they gave us 72 hours to build something based on a theme. The whole thing would be streamed live as the 12 teams competed. The theme was “game of games” and the rules were pretty basic. It had to be a game with a clear winner (nothing too general), it had to be safe, and it had to fit in their shipping container.

Our project is called “the minotaur’s revenge”, and is basically a set of dueling labyrinths. A pair of giant tilting mazes that have to be controlled while attempting to trigger traps on your opponents table. We knew that watching us screw some wood together for 3 days would be painfully dull, so we put extra effort into keeping our feed amusing. We had scheduled events like a fire breather, grafitti artists, people in costume, and strange things happening all the time. We took time to answer questions and converse with our watchers. It paid off, our feed was usually host to double the viewers of any other feed.

Keep reading for a full writeup on how everything was made, along with a ton of pictures and some video.

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[Dino’s] Talking Box(es)

July 24, 2012 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

[Dino] is about three-quarters of the way through his talking box project. He’s completed one of the two boxes, and is showing off the technique he uses to marry motion with sound in order to mimic flapping lips with the box top.

You may remember [Dino’s] first look at the EMIC2. It’s a single-board text to speech module which is what provides the voice for the box. But what fun is that without some animatronics to go along with it? So [Dino] started playing around with different concepts to move the box top along with the speech. This is easier said than done, but as you can see in the video after the break, he did pull it off rather well. He built a motor control circuit that takes the audio output of an LM386 amplifier chip and translates it into drive signals for the motor. The shaft is not directly connected to the lid of the box. Instead it has a curved wire which is limited by a piece of string so that it doesn’t spin too far. It lifts the lid which is hinged with a piece of cloth.

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Motorized Camera Rig Makes Panoramic Shooting Simple

July 24, 2012 by Mike Nathan 10 Comments

diy-panorama-rig

Where some people might see a pile of junk, Hackaday reader and budget-conscious photo nut [FantomFotographer] sees inspiration. He was in search of a rig that would help him take better panoramic photos and found all that he needed to build one right around him.

He had an old tripod kicking around, which serves as the base for rig. At the top sits a pair of servos [FantomFotographer] attached to the tripod with some scrap wood, screws, and glue. The servos are driven by an Arduino Nano, which sits comfortably in a plastic enclosure he scavenged from trash heap. He uses an IR receiver to control the whole thing, which allows him to not only change shooting angles, but camera settings as well.

While it might sound like all is well with his upcycled camera rig, [FantomFotographer] says that like every project, there is some room for improvement. He’s keeping the source code under wraps at the moment, but once he gets everything working to his liking, he says that he’ll release it.

In the meantime, be sure to check out the cool panoramas he has put together.

Real Life Subtitle Glasses

July 23, 2012 by Gerrit Coetzee 15 Comments

[Will Powell] sent in his real-time subtitle glasses project. Inspired by the ever cool Google Project Glass, he decided he would experiment with his own version.

He used two Raspberry Pi’s running Debian squeeze, vuzix glasses, microphones, a tv, ipad, and iphone as the hardware components. The flow of data is kind of strange in this project. The audio first gets picked up by a bluetooth microphone and streamed through a smart device to a server on the network. Once it’s on the server it gets parsed through Microsoft’s translation API. After that the translated message is sent back to a Raspberry Pi where it’s displayed as subtitles on the glasses.

Of course this is far from a universal translation device as seen in Star Trek. The person being translated has to talk clearly into a microphone, and there is a huge layer of complexity. Though, as far as tech demos go it is pretty cool and you can see him playing a game of chess using the system after the break.

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Cutting Islands Into Copper-clad PCBs With A Drill

July 20, 2012 by Mike Nathan 18 Comments

If you’re looking to build some small radio circuits, or if you are simply seeking a new look for your PCBs, you might want to check out what YouTube user [AndyDaviesByTheSea] has been working on lately. He has been building RF circuits as of late and was searching for a better way to create islands or “lands” on copper-clad PCBs.

He says that these sorts of islands are traditionally cut into the PCB with a scalpel or file – hardly an efficient process. [Andy] did a little experimenting and found a great way to quickly and precisely cut lands with a drill. Borrowing a bit of metal from an old VHS tape, he crafted a circular land cutter with a metal file. When mounted as a drill bit, his cutter produces clean, shallow cuts which create perfect lands on which to solder his components.

The only drawback to this method is that [Andy] found his bits were being dulled by the fiberglass boards pretty quickly. His solution was to carefully grind a broken heavy duty drill bit to do the task, which he says works even better than his original cutter.

Hackaday RBC Team Finished!

July 19, 2012 by Mike Szczys 28 Comments

Our Project: “Minotaur’s Revenge”

We built two giant marble mazes. The maze itself is all mechanical, with a 2 person team controlling x and y axis. The fun happens though when you hit buttons to activate magnets and traps on the other team’s table.

Check out the Live Stream. Nothing is happening at the moment, but a couple of dedicated Hackaday fans are checking out an empty couch. We have a very strange readership.

[sonofabit] recorded the last 8 hours of the build at 1fps and made a time lapse video. It’s an hour long, and we thank [sonofabit]’s CPU for all its hard work. You can also check out the video after the break.

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Reclaiming The Numpad For Laptop Users Everywhere

July 19, 2012 by Mike Szczys 37 Comments

We have to agree with NYCResistor, the exclusion of numeric pads from laptops is a real loss for productivity. Ever try to working with a huge spreadsheet ledger without a 10-key? Sure, there are usually function key alternatives hiding somewhere on those reduced keyboards. But that’s hardly the same thing. We think it’s time to take back the numpad. This project shows you how easy it is by using some old time lab equipment to replace the missing keys.

They’re using a Teensy microcontroller board to translate the key matrix into USB inputs. Most of the work is already done for you because of the USB HID Keyboard library available for the development board. Scanning your own key matrix, or decoding the buttons from some rad hardware like this Walters 600E is up to you. A demo of the rig in action can be found after the jump.

Is there anyone else who wishes the 10-key had an ‘X’ on it for coding hex values? Perhaps that will be a future project for us.

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