Instructables “Hackaday Edition”

December 20, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 67 Comments

We got a pleasant letter from [Eric Willhelm], the owner of Instructables. He wanted to shoot a token of good will our direction, in the form of an EPUB of some of the projects we’ve linked to in the last quarter of 2010. These are Ad-free and have all images included. You can download it and view it on the e-reader of your choice, or even in your browser with the appropriate plugin. The videos still link back to Instructables, but he thought our readership might enjoy having an ad-free experience. He says that link should work for about a month.

For those who really want ad free content and are willing to pay for it, Instructables has been putting out publications that are collections of instructables on certain topics. For example, [Eric] pointed out that they’ve compiled some that might be of interest to us like “Better living through microcontrollers” and “Amazing LED Projects“. Actually, there are a bunch of titles and it looks like some are free as well.

Thanks [Eric], I’m sure your actions gained a little respect, even from those who dislike Instructables generally due to ads and registration.

Santa-pede Challenge: The Conclusion

December 18, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 66 Comments

At the end of October we announced the Buy, Break, Build series kick off with “The Santa-pede Challenge“. The goal was to get your hands on one of those annoying dancing santas, tear it apart, then use its parts to build something that walks. We got our hands on some cool prizes and even got [Phillip Torrone] to be a guest judge. Join us after the break to see just what we came up with and maybe have a few laughs.

Continue reading “Santa-pede Challenge: The Conclusion” →

The Heinz Automato

December 17, 2010 by Chris Nelson 27 Comments

[Bill Fienup] and [Barry Kudrowitz]’s robots, The Automatos, have been leaving a sticky path of destruction all over the internet. Their sole purpose: to crap ketchup. They accomplish this feat by dumping a CO2 cartridge into a ketchup bottle at the push of a button, leading to some pretty awesome results. While the details are a little sparse it appears that they are using RC cars for the base and a small air gun CO2 cartridge to push the ketchup. The latest version aka the Atuomato 4 appears to be multi-actuated and can shoot more than once for maximum ketchup proliferation. See some videos of it in action after the break.

Continue reading “The Heinz Automato” →

RepRapped Transistors

December 15, 2010 by Devlin Thyne 23 Comments

[Mr. Kim] and [John Sarik] made a presentation(pdf) at last weekend’s Botacon conference on how they made organic field-effect transistors (OFETs). A wooden RepRap, the fancifully named Unicorn from Makerbot (or printed from Thingiverse), hacked felt pen, a handful of chemicals, and a couple of pieces of lab equipment were needed to print (plot) out transistors. We were unable to attend the conference, so this is what we inferred from the slides. Silver ink is printed onto a glass slide to form the gate regions, cured and partially masked-off. A layer of CP1 Resin is spin-coated onto the slide to form the dielectric barrier between the gate and the semiconductor, the drain, and source regions. Silver ink is once again used, this time to print out the drain and source regions. The last thing printed is P3HT dissolved in toluene to form the semiconductor region. It would be interesting to see this process modified so that all coatings and curing can be done without removing the slide from the printer.

Thanksgiving With Thermite

November 25, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 38 Comments

For those in the states, Happy Thanksgiving. Whether or not you celebrate the traditional holiday, you might still want to take a moment to think of what you are thankful for. We are thankful for our readers, who drive us to keep posting projects and challenge us to improve our skills. The Hackers, who supply us projects to write about, both simple and complicated. We are thankful for our bosses, who employ us to do this awesome stuff and only beat us occasionally. And we are thankful for thermite, which burns oh so bright and looks oh so pretty.

Join us after the break to see a turkey, roasted with thermite in slow motion.

[via Neatorama]

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SparkFun Free Day 2011: Now With Gambling

November 24, 2010 by Mike Szczys 52 Comments

SparkFun has just announced a Free Day for 2011. Last year was the first time they decided to give away $100,000 in the form of $100 credits that melted down their servers and made the rest of the world (you know, the non-geek sort) ask what SparkFun was when it started trending on Twitter, Google, and every other form of digital communication.

Well, they’re doing it again this year, albeit quite differently. Mark your calendar for Thursday, January 13th at 9am Mountain Standard Time. But it’s not as simple as having your cart pre-filled and trying to bum rush the checkout pages. Now you’ve got options; take a loyalty payout of $10 for each year that has passed since you registered an account with them, or gamble for a $100 credit. The latter involves answering ten questions, rewarded with $10 for each correct answer and penalized $3 for each wrong answer. If you don’t finish all ten before the money runs out you get zip.

There’s several bits of good news here. First, they just picked up a new rack of servers which should help keep the website from crashing. Secondly, the prize money has been ramped up by %50 to a total of $150,000. And finally, if you choose to answer the trivia questions, $2 is being donated to charity for each correct answer. So study up on your electronic theory and you can help others while trying to help yourself.

[Thanks Diego]

Hack A Day Classifieds

November 18, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 42 Comments

Announcing Hack a Day Classifieds! Buy, sell, trade your tools and junk with other Hack a Day readers.

Quite often, we get emails or comments with people asking “do you want this piece of junk?” or “Would you sell that thing?”. We usually just push them off on craigslist, but we realize that it can be hard to find our specific flavor of stuff in craigslist. Who posts a half smashed tube radio on there?

Our answer is to give you guys the Hack a Day Classifieds. We know it isn’t perfect, but we wanted to supply this service to hackers. Feel free to post what you’ve got. Think of it like a little mini craigslist, just for us. It should be fully functional and ready to go, but who knows what issues we’ll see when you all start going there. Please be patient and understanding with us.