HackaDay Is Entering In The Redbull Creation Contest

June 26, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 10 Comments

When I returned from MakerFaire Kansas City I was very pleased to find a Bullduino waiting on my doorstep! Hackaday has been accepted into the first round of the Redbull Creation Contest. I’m doing the physical building while the other writers are consulting for this round. I’m also pulling people from around me here at SquidFoo (my local hackerspace) that can help.

Today, I got lucky enough to run into [Tony Sherwood] from MakerBot. I told him my idea and he eagerly volunteered to lend his brains and his brawn… as well as his Makerbot Replicator. He’s been extremely helpful so far offering very good ideas on how we can get this thing operational as fast as possible.

I’m not going to share exactly what we’re building yet. I can tell you it will not be the most complex project, but it will be really fun, and most likely dangerous. We’re starting today, which means we have very little time to build. Lets hope we can make something interesting enough to go to round two!

Strange Login Request At Hackaday.com

June 25, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 43 Comments

We’ve received numerous messages about this new login popup on our site. This is NOT our doing. It is most likely some ancient script from our ancient template that has finally become outdated or expired. We’re working on a resolution. If you hit cancel it will go away.

We are truly sorry for the inconvenience and are working to get rid of this immediately.

Update: It is gone. It was a site statistics script from sitemeeter that suddenly had issues on many sites. We try VERY HARD to make sure our advertisements are unobtrusive since we rely on those ads to support us. Anything that gets in the way of you reading our site is bad.

NC Maker Faire 2012: Robot Hockey

June 21, 2012 by Jeremy Cook 9 Comments

Robot combat has inspired makers probably since the first one was conceived. Whether it’s an epic struggle between two future superpowers, or simply a friendly match of robot hockey, it’s always fun to watch. NC Maker Faire 2012 was no exception as [Carolina Combat Robots] had a small arena with remote control robots going at it. The matches were incredibly popular, and I was glad to be able to see some of it from my table next door!

Check out the video after the break for some footage of these ‘bots in action! Continue reading “NC Maker Faire 2012: Robot Hockey” →

AVC From The Vehicle’s Perspective

June 20, 2012 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

Team 0x27 was the winner of this year’s AVC, the Autonomous Vehicle Contest put on by SparkFun Electronics. You’ll find video of the two runs from this entry (the third run did not finish). We love it that there’s an on-board camera recording both video and sound of the race from the vehicle’s point of view. They haven’t updated their team page yet but we’re sure they will once their done celebrating.

On the first run the team opted not to use obstacle avoidance, and here you can see it annihilating one of the barrels from the course (this is the second one it took out with hulk-like rage). These collisions didn’t keep it from finishing the circuit. On the second run it didn’t slam into anything. Because of the hoop-deduction (a bonus for threading the needle during the run) the official time came in at 2.08 seconds. Still, the unadjusted time of 32.08 seconds is a course record and beat the fastest finisher from the airborne group of compeititors. Nice.

Seriously, this video just cracks us up!

Continue reading “AVC From The Vehicle’s Perspective” →

Mini Waterproof LED Lanterns Charge Without Wires

June 19, 2012 by Mike Nathan 23 Comments

inductive-charge-led-lights

If you’re in search of a flashlight that can stand up to the elements, or simply looking for an easy way to spruce up your pool for those hot summer nights, check out these rechargeable PVC LED lights. Inspired by a post in Make: Magazine featuring Indestructible LED Lanterns, [John Duffy] decided to take the project one step further.

While he liked Make’s iteration of the waterproof lantern, he thought it would be best to permanently seal the lights for maximum durability. Not satisfied with a one-use light, he equipped the PVC lanterns with a single rechargeable AA battery, step-up circuitry to drive the LED, and an inductive charging coil.

His floating, waterproof lights sport a slightly bigger footprint than their predecessors to house the extra electronics, but we think that’s more than a fair trade off considering they can be charged wirelessly.

Place your Digikey/Mouser/Jameco orders now and check out [John’s] how-to video – you just might get some of these built in time for the weekend!

[via HackedGadgets]

Continue reading “Mini Waterproof LED Lanterns Charge Without Wires” →

Mini Maker Faire In Eugene, OR This Weekend

June 14, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 6 Comments

[Rick Osgood] wrote in to tell us about the Eugene, OR Mini Maker Faire going on this weekend. The event is being hosted on the grounds of the Science Factory with a lot of help from the Eugune Makerspace

So far, Steamworks Cycles, the South Eugene Robotics Team, Oregon Rocketry and Eugene Rocketery will be at the Maker Faire showing off their skills and wares. It looks like an excellent place to spend the day, with events hosted by the Science Factor and the Eugene Makerspace all day long.

Tickets are $4.00 a pop; easy enough on our wallets, but unfortunately the official Hackaday transporter pad won’t be ready in time for this weekend. If anyone would like to write a blog post about the sights and sounds of the Eugene Mini Maker Faire, send it in and we’ll put it up.

Introducing Hack A Day: The Retro Edition

June 12, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 52 Comments

Hack a Day hasn’t change its format since 2004. Even though MAKE has gone Web 2.0 with buttons using mouseover, and Instructables has fancy drop-down menus, Hack a Day has been a constant black background, green text child of the web circa 2004. A while ago, we decided it was time for an update to our layout. Today we’re pleased to announce an open beta test for our upcoming update – Hack a Day: the retro edition.

In case you’re wondering, yes, this is a joke, and no, we’re not going all Web 0.1a on you.

The retro edition is a little side project to our upcoming update where we’ll be rolling out a new template for Hack a Day. We’re going to fix a lot of the problems with the current template – searching, and an admittedly terrible commenting system design – and generally ‘cleaning up’ the design. We already have the store up and running, so progress on the update is slowly being made.

As far as the retro edition goes, we’re keeping that. We’ve had a few nerd-offs trying to load Hack a Day on the oldest computer possible, so a version of Hack a Day built for computers from 1983 seemed like a worthwhile goal. Think of it as a challenge: if you can send in a picture of your Commodore PET loading up the retro edition, we’ll add you to the retro successes page.

There’s a bit more we’d like to do with the retro edition, namely guides to getting your old computers up on the Internet. As a little bonus (and in keeping with the retro theme), we’re putting up a few classic Hack a Day posts from the days of yore.

So, there you go. We’ve tested the retro edition on a Mac PowerBook 170 and a Quadra 700, but feel free to dig out your old hardware and give this a spin.

EDIT: As far as the ‘retro competition’ goes, [Jaromir] wrote in and brought up an interesting point: Loading that .GIF logo would be really hard on computers with kilobytes of ram, so I’m changing that to a .BMP. Just so we’re all clear, there are no official rules, you’re competing against yourself, and if you can get a picture of an old computer loading this site, you’re going to be listed on the ‘successes’ page.