A LEGO Turing Machine For [Alan]’s Centennial

June 18, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 12 Comments

2012 is the 100-year anniversary of [Alan Turing]’s birth, and to celebrate the centennial, [Jeroen] and [Davy] over at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in The Netherlands built a Turing machine out of LEGO.

A Turing machine is an extremely simple device, but is still able to compute everything your desktop can. The machine is generally described as an infinite paper tape with a read/write head. On this paper tape, the numbers ‘1’ and ‘0’ are written. By precisely defining what the Turing machine should do when it comes across a ‘1’ or ‘0’, its able to do the same calculations as a laptop, albeit at a much slower rate.

The LEGO Turing machine has a series of pins signifying each bit. These pins are moved underneath a read/write head containing a light sensor and robotic arm. When a pin is down, the camera sees a dark spot signifying one state. When the pin is up, light reflects off a white LEGO piece signifying another state.

[Jeroen] and [Davy] built an IDE for their Turing machine, so if you’ve got a few LEGO NTX bricks lying around you can grab the Git and build your own. Check out the mini documentary after the break.

Continue reading “A LEGO Turing Machine For [Alan]’s Centennial” →

Adding A Router And Wireless Camera To A Remote Controlled Helicopter

June 11, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 12 Comments

Last Christmas, [bonafide] received a WiFi enabled remote control helicopter from his employer. The heli is an interesting bit of kit, able to be controlled with an Android or iDevice. Being the good tinkerer he is, [bonafide] took a screwdriver to his Wi-Fli Bladerunner Helicopter and reengineered the toy to use an off-the-shelf wireless router.

The protocol used by the Wi-Fli helicopter is closed source, but a few people have had their hand at reverse engineering this cool toy. Instead of simply controlling the helicopter over WiFi, [bonafide] wanted to add a few unsupported features like sending images from a webcam. This isn’t supported in the toy’s firmware, so after a valiant attempt at flashing new firmware, [bonafide] decided to replace the electronics with a WiFi router.

In the stock configuration, the helicopter receives commands from an RT5350F-based WiFi module. This module communicates to the servos and motors with a serial connection. [bonafide] replaced the WiFi module with a very small router capable of running OpenWRT. The new router was easily configured to send commands to the motors, and allowed [bonafide] to add a small keychain webcam to stream video back to his desktop.

Interestingly, the makers of the WiFli helicopter, Interactive Toy Concepts, are putting out a streaming-video version of this toy next fall. The current version of the WiFli helicopter may hit the Toys ‘r Us clearance bin before that, so if you’d like your own unmanned aerial drone [bonafide]’s may be worth looking over.

Special thanks to [MS3FGX] for sending this one in. Also, the non-coral cache version of [bonafide]’s site is here, but try not to turn his server into a pile of molten slag.

Automatic Wakeboarding In A Pond

June 6, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 24 Comments

[Rick] sent in an awesome project he and his uncle [Charlie] have been working on for this summer. It’s a completely automatic wakeboarding system that tows [Charlie] and company from one end of his backyard pond and back again.

The entire system is supported by two towers at either end of the pond. Strung between these towers is a 420 foot cable that pulls the rider from one end to the other before stopping, and automatically continuing in the opposite direction. Apart from stopping and starting the motor attached to the cable, no user input is required. This means anyone lucky enough to make it to [Charlie]’s farm can wakeboard all afternoon without a break.

[Rick] posted a few short videos covering the internals of the system. From what we can see, the guys are using a LabJack U3-LV data acquisition unit to grab the speed, direction, and position of the rider. This data is sent to a laptop that controls the motor suspended on one of the towers.

There are a few more videos of this incredibly fun toy available after the break.

Continue reading “Automatic Wakeboarding In A Pond” →

Wi-Fli Copter Broken? Harvest The Parts!

June 4, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 10 Comments

[Nick] was somewhat disappointed when the Wi-Fly helicopter he bought his son broke in less than 10 minutes. The main gear that turns the rotor split in half, rendering the copter WiFi enabled trash. [Nick] however decided that he didn’t want to waste an opportunity and harvested the receiver parts. To test them out, he wired them up to the controller for an R/C truck. This gave him a WiFi truck with a nifty android interface. It actually works pretty well, as you can see in the video below. [Nick] points out that, while this works fine, he could ultimately repurpose this fancy little WIFI controlled 3v switch to whatever he wants. He mentions garage doors and lights (and terminators), so this might be an opportunistic way for him to get into some fun home automation.

Continue reading “Wi-Fli Copter Broken? Harvest The Parts!” →

Waterproofing An RC Plane

June 4, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 5 Comments

A few years ago, the EasyStar RC plane took the remote control community by storm, launching dozens of clone ready to fly planes that found their way onto many fields, rooftops, and trees. [hammydude] wanted to take his EasyStar with him while also playing around with his jetski, so he did the reasonable thing: he waterproofed his remote control plane.

The EasyStar is made of foam, but that doesn’t mean it’s ready to land on a lake. To prevent any damage to the electronics, servos, and pushrods, [hammy] slightly modified the fuselage of his plane and potted the electronics in silicone glue. Now this excellent RC plane is capable of landing on calm water with a slow self-destruction.

[hammy] has flown his EasyStar seaplane in salt water, but that is a terrible environment for the exposed brushless motor. Before packing it in for the day, [hammy] pours a bit of fresh water over the motor and throttles up for a minute or two. This seems to be good enough for the bearings in the motor; in the video after the break, you can see [hammy] submerge his plane in the water and take it for a short test flight. There’s some great in-flight shots taken from the EasyStar – surely an awesome way to enjoy a trip to the shore.

Continue reading “Waterproofing An RC Plane” →

Making Color Matched Perler Bead Art

June 1, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 7 Comments

You may remember Perler beads from first or second grade; these small plastic beads are placed into a peg board and then ironed to produce a solid multicolored piece of plastic. Recently, Perler beads have seen somewhat of a revival due to a few people creating 8 and 16-bit video game sprites in plastic, but there’s still the enormous effort of color matching beads to make a passable Sonic or Mega Man.

[Jon Wilson] sent in an awesome bead pattern generator that takes those color images of video game sprites – and just about any other picture – and translates them into Perler bead patterns. One awesome feature is color matching; [Jon] found the RGB values of every color of Perler beads and his program chooses the closest match from the original image.

[Jon] started on a GUI app for his bead pattern generator, but because his kids aren’t into beads anymore the GUI is still unfinished. There is a command line Python script that takes an image and shoots out a PDF of the bead pattern, which should be more than enough for all but the most complicated design.

BrainTap, Gaming With Arthritis In Mind

June 1, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 3 Comments

As a final project in their 3rd year of the University of Technology Sydney, [James] and a few classmates put together this interesting game. Called BrainTap, it is described as a game targeted at the baby boomers focusing on fine motor skills and memory.

The game plays similar to the common game “simon”. The box lights up a series of LEDs in a pattern, then you have to repeat the pattern back with the corresponding buttons in the glove. There is vibration feedback in the glove as well as the lights and sounds you see in the video. Though they do mention arthritis in their title, we don’t think our grandmas with arthritis would enjoy those hand motions much. We, however, might spend hours doing this instead of more important things.

We particularly like the visual construction of the game box. The case was designed in CAD, 3d printed, then sanded smooth and painted with automotive paint to get that perfect finish. Great job guys.

Continue reading “BrainTap, Gaming With Arthritis In Mind” →