Freakyphone Has A Puzzle For You!

freakyphone

[Mime] likes to make puzzles and games for his friends to play, often using recycled electronics to construct them. He had been contemplating a sound-based game for some time when he came across an old rotary phone at a garage sale that would be perfect for what he had in mind.

He calls his creation the Freakyphone, and the goal of the game is to guess the name of a historical figure via a series of audible clues. The phone was constructed using an Arduino that plays audio using a sound shield from Adafruit. While he was ultimately unable to get the phone’s ringer to work properly, [Mime] says that the build process was relatively easy overall.

When activated, the phone buzzes for attention, prompting the player to pick up the handset. After introducing the game, the phone will ring additional times with random sound clips to clue the player into the historical figure’s name. If the player correctly enters the person’s name using the rotary dial, they receive a “winning tone” and the game is over.

It’s always nice to see someone building gadgets for their friends just for the sake of fun – nice work!

Continue reading to see a video showing how the Freakyphone was built along with a demo of the game.

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ATtiny Hacks: Infrared Guidance And Navigation

After [trandi] got his hands on a cheap R/C helicopter he realized the difficulties in actually flying a remote control helicopter. Instead of giving up, he decided to reverse-engineer the infrared protocol and then build a decoder around an ATtiny that would send commands to another microcontroller using a serial connection.

The remote’s communications protocol was decoded with the help of a Freeduino and an IR remote analysis sketch [trandi] found on the Arduino website. After importing the data into Gnuplot, there was enough data to write a sketch in Processing to visualize the infrared pulses.

After figuring out the protocol of his remote control, [trandi] built a tiny circuit to decrypt the IR commands and send them over a serial link to another microcontroller. The ATtiny45-based build doesn’t take up very much space on the perfboard making it very easy to mount on any robot of his choosing. He ended up connecting it to a Lego NTX brick allowing him to use the helicopter remote with any Lego build he can dream up.

[trandi] invested a lot of work around a cheap remote control; if the remote broke, all would be for naught. This was remedied with an IR beacon that replicates the function of the remote. The beacon is based on an ATtiny13 and can serve as a stand-alone beacon for autonomous robots or can accept serial commands from a computer. Not a bad build if you ask us.

Keeping Simple Children’s Toys Interesting With Small Modifications

souping_up_slot_cars

[Jaroslav] was racing slot cars with his son not too long ago, but like many of us discovered in our youth, driving cars around a small oval track can get dull after awhile. Rather than buy more track sections, he decided to fiddle with their cars a bit to make racing them a little more exciting.

After removing the top of his slot car, [Jaroslav] found that it cruised around corners with ease, giving him a distinct advantage over his son. He did the same with his son’s car to level the playing field, then he decided to add a few extra LEDs to make driving around the small track more lively.

Now, this obviously isn’t the most advanced of modifications, but it is a great example of extending the useful life of a toy by using cheap, easy to access components. We think that it would be reasonable to add even more features to the cars/track such as speed-dependent lighting or lap counters without changing the car dynamics all that much.

Any thoughts or suggestions to help [Jaroslav] soup up his kid’s race track even more? Share them with us in the comments.

PCB Drill From R/C Car Parts

[Sid] makes a few PCBs a month and the hardest part of his fabrication process is always drilling the through-holes. He has a PCB hand drill that usually results in a sore index finger. After a few unsuccessful attempts of using a full-size electric drill and not wanting to invest in a commercial solution, [Sid] made a PCB drill from a broken R/C car.

The toy car was donated by [Sid]’s 4-year-old after a terrible crash. [Sid] took the gearbox from the car and added a small circuit to control the direction of the drill. After attaching the drill chuck to the former R/C car axle and adding the power leads to a 5 Volt adapter, a PCB drill press was born.

Most of the parts for this build were salvaged from the toy car’s radio control circuit. Except for the chuck from [Sid]’s hand drill and a few switches, everything on this build was pulled from a broken remote control car. While the build is a lot simpler than this semi-automatic PCB drill, [Sid]’s drill seems to work well. Check out the demo video after the break.

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No Quarters Required For This Sidescrolling Game In A Box

teagduino_game_in_a_box

[Adam] from Teague Labs wrote in to share a new gadget they built to help demonstrate the capabilities of the Teagueduino. Their table top video game in a box was made with a bunch of electronic components they had sitting around, as well as soda straws, plenty of painter’s tape, and some popscicle sticks.

When someone pulls the string on the front of the box, a servo opens it automatically, and a second servo starts spinning the game reel. As the reel moves, the player is presented with a set of obstacles to dodge, guiding the “hero” via a knob-controlled servo. A hall sensor attached to the back of the character is tripped when passing over any of the obstacles, which are attached to the reel with magnetic tape. When the hero collides with an obstacle, the game ends and proceeds to close itself, much to the chagrin of the player.

As you can see in the video below, it’s a pretty entertaining and challenging game.

Looking to make one of your own? Swing by the Teagueduino site to grab the game’s code and be sure to share your creations with us in the comments.

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Using Nixie Tubes As Robot Eyes

[radmeck] on the ez-robot.com forums came up with a great use for Nixie tubes. Instead of using Nixies for clocks, or indicating values, he used them as robot eyes.

He used the arduNIX Arduino-powered Nixie tube driver to power the tubes. [radmeck] was very impressed with the arduNIX kit. The kit is able to drive eight Nixies or eighty neon bulbs, but there’s no word from [radmeck] on additional Nixies or neons in his build. The eventual goal of the project is to rebuild the Omnibot while adding more servos and motors. The EZ-B robot controller will be used to control the robot, something we’ve seen before.

[radmeck]’s Omnibot looks a lot better after the retr0bright bath, and with Nixie eyes its even more adorable. While the Omnibot didn’t live up to the original promise of impressing your girlfriend, Nixie tube eyes will give you some blog cred.

Check out the video of the much-improved Omnibot after the break.

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MindFlex Watches As You Judge Others By Sight Alone

mindflex_headset

[Paul] really wanted to know what his brain was thinking.

No, really. He is aware of all the thoughts that come and go, but he wanted to know what was going on in his brain below his conscious thought stream. Armed with a MindFlex headset and a Teensy, he set out to decode what really was going on inside his head.

He spent a month crawling 35 million Google profiles, downloading each user’s pictures into a MySQL database. The Teensy was attached to the MindFlex sensor board, and collects all of the headset’s output over a serial connection.

His experiment consisted of flashing each of the profile pictures on his monitor for one second, recording 2 of the 11 available brainwave channels from the MindFlex. These values were then plotted out so that he could visualize the “Attention” and “Meditation” values captured by the headset. At the end of the day he discovered, interestingly enough, that looking at dogs relaxed him the most!

We would love to see what correlations could be drawn from his collected data, and what sorts of “hidden” thoughts are coursing through others’ brains. It could certainly end up being a double-edged sword, uncovering subconscious biases and other such things, but it’s an incredibly intriguing experiment to say the least.

Be sure to check out the video below of the experiment in progress.

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