[Keith]’s cousin gave him a LCD with a noisy backlight. He decided to replace it with a series of high output LEDs. He sourced some locally in the form of cheap LED headlamps from an auto-parts store. The results look pretty good – and the write up contains this gem: “…One [LED] also exploded due to an accidental overvolt. Shot me in the Chest. Panel okay though” Nice work.
Peripherals Hacks1562 Articles
Optoisolated Xmas Light Control
[buzzkill] brought this crazy christmas light controller to my attention. The hack is pretty neat. The potiometers in several standard dimmers were replaced with photo-resistors. When squares of the screen are lit, the dimmer is activated. In essence, it’s a cheap optoisolator for controlling AC power. The software that generates the interface appears to be sound actuated once it’s programmed by the user.
The Simpler USB2LCD
USB LCD interfaces aren’t new around here. [John] sent this latest one. It uses a single ATMega chip and a few cheap components to implement the whole thing. The venerable HD44780 compatible is the text LCD of choice.
I’m on vacation at the moment, but I’ll start putting up some Hack-A-Day design challenge entries pretty soon.
DIY ‘PS3 Sixaxis’ Controller
[max] lets us know about this DIY ‘PS3 SIXAXIS’ style programmable controller. It’s a USB device that uses an accelerometer to provide an interactive human interface. They put one inside a model airplane and use it with a flight-sim. (I’d like to see them add some gyros to add some realistic resistance to the plane interface.)
Laser 3d Scanning With A Webcam
[Jan] noted that they’ve come up with an interesting, low cost method of 3d scanning over (Update: http://www.david-laserscanner.com/wiki) at the Institute for Robotics and Process Control. Once the software is calibrated with the preset background image, a laser line is run over the object (Just think about every sci-fi laser scanner you’ve ever seen) The software appears to measure the contour of the object by the breaks in the line as it’s passed over the object. Once a mesh of measurements is taken, the object can be reconstructed in the software. According to [Jan] “With Their technique they won the Main Prize of the “work group for Pattern recognition” this Year in Berlin.” Now, make it work under something besides windows and .NET.
Get your Design Challenge entries in! The 25th is rolling up on us quick!
IM Serial Puppet
[Pierre-Philippe] sent in his instant messenger USB puppet. It’s a little silly, but I like it. The puppets servo is driven by a pic controller with a max232 serial/ttl converter. To make things interesting, it responds to people entering and leaving gaim or xchat.
Gesture Laser Pointer Control
After I linked his basic laser pointer webcam interface the other day, [mnt] sent me this excellent demo of his gesture based laser pointer control. This one works alot like graffiti on the old palm pilots. My question? What does he make when he’s not sick?
