Converting A Lame Tron Toy Into A Cool Halloween Costume Prop

August 27, 2011 by Mike Nathan 12 Comments

sweet_souped_up_tron_identity_disc

Instructable user [cubeberg’s] daughter saw Tron:Legacy earlier this year and decided right then and there that she wanted to dress up as Quorra for Halloween. Being the awesome dad he is, he decided to make her costume himself, and hit the stores in search of an Identity Disc to complete the look.

The toy was pretty underwhelming, and lacked the lighting that a proper Tron prop should have. He figured he had the skills to make it a bit better, so he gathered some tools, a bunch of LEDs, and set off for his workshop. He gutted the disc, cutting out any extraneous bits of plastic he could find. He wired up 64 LEDs between the disc’s inner and outer ring, which he controls using an ATmega 328 paired with a Max7221 display driver.

He doesn’t show any pictures of what the toy looked like beforehand, but the final product looks great. We bet that his daughter is pretty pumped for Halloween to roll around – we know we would be.

Continue reading to see a quick video demo of his souped up Identity Disc in action.

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“Counting Box” Also Saves Calculators From Small Children

August 25, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 27 Comments

[Nathan]’s son really loves numbers and counting, and one of his favorite things to do is add 1 to a calculator over and over again. Being the awesome dad that he is, [Nathan] built his son a counting box that has a 10-digit rotary switch and two arcade buttons to add and subtract.

One goal of the project was to have the counting box retain memory of the display while being powered off. The easiest way to do this is to write the display data to the ATmega’s EEPROM. This EEPROM is only rated for 100,000 write cycles (although in practice it’s much higher), so [Nathan] included a 24LC256 in a little spasm of over-engineering. All the electronics are laid out on perf board, and the case is constructed from bamboo that was laser cut by Ponoko. The quality of the case itself is fairly remarkable – we’re really impressed with the finish and the magnetic battery access door.

From experience, we know that playing with an HP-15C eventually leads to a broken calculator and having our Nintendo taken away. We’re really happy for [Nathan]’s son, and wish we had our own counting box at his age.

High Voltage: Build Your Own 84 KV Lightning Stick

August 24, 2011 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

There’s a proverb that says ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick’. Now that stick can come in a high-voltage form factor. The device above, which reminds us of a side-handled baton with a coke can stuck on the end, is a portable Van de Graaff generator.

Although debated in the comments, the creator of this hack claims you can shock someone with 84 kV of electricity using the device. Of course as a weapon it’s lacking since we’re talking about static electricity; the voltage can be through the roof but the current is extremely low. Despite that, there are some fun things you can do with them. The video after the break show it throwing off sparks with the lights dimmed. [Yardleydobon] also includes a few other tricks at the end of his tutorial. He makes a set of Franklin Bells using two more soda cans with the aluminum tab from one suspended in between them. As he charges it up, the tab dances back and forth, ringing the ‘bells’ it runs into. Once they are charged, the ringing can be restarted by discharging just one of the cans.

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Can A Dippy Bird Be Used As A Temperature Sensor?

August 23, 2011 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

Dippy birds are the toys that teeter-totter back and forth as the beak of bird-shaped body dips into a container of water. The felt covering the beak and head picks up water and, through evaporation, cools that end of the glass tubing. The temperature changes cause the dichloromethane to either boil off, or condense, shifting the weight of the liquid thereby pivoting the glass body.

The real question is, does the temperature of the water cause the toy to move differently, and can that be measured to calculate the temperature of the water? [Craig] put that query to the test, by designing an apparatus to measure the motion of a Dippy Bird. A photointerruptor was used to measure the motion of the body, causing an interrupt each time the tail of the bird passes in between the sensor and the emitter. For control data a DS1820 temperature sensor was positioned near the felt on the head of the bird, and a relative humidity sensor captured readings at the same time. Data from the three inputs was collected over a two-day period. Although not a precise measurement, the motion of the bird did trend in the same ways that were recorded by the temperature and relative humidity sensors.

DIY RC Sensor Board

August 18, 2011 by Mike Nathan 5 Comments

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Along with hobby electronics, flying RC planes is one of [Diederich’s] favorite hobbies. When out in the field, he prefers to use an Aurora 9 radio controller, and while the remote is great, he was a bit disappointed in Hitec’s telemetry sensor lineup. He says that the sensors are pretty decent, though limited, and he was positive he could build a better telemetry solution.

His sensor board is completely open source, and comes with a long list of features. First and foremost, it emulates all of the messages that can be sent to the radio controller by Hitec’s off the shelf models, making it a simple drop-in replacement. He uses an ATMega8L microcontroller to run the show, including all sorts of input pins and connectors to support GPS as well as voltage and current monitoring.

He has made a DIY kit available for purchase online, but all of the sensor’s schematics and a BOM are available for free, should you desire to roll your own.

We love seeing DIYers show up manufacturers in this way, especially when they share the goods with their fellow hobbyists. Nice job!

Electric Longboard Uses DIY Hub Motors

August 17, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 12 Comments

As a student of MIT, [Jed Storey] has access to a ton of machine tools, so he decided to build an electric longboard with hub motors by hand. He wound up re-doing a lot of his project, so we can commiserate with him on the trials of R&D.

Inspired by the BWD scooter, [Jed]‘s longboard uses hub motors – the wheel is the motor. The rotors were fabricated in-house, and off-the-shelf stators were wound by [Jed] by hand. There’s a lot of work that went into this build, and the build log is really fascinating in this regard.

The board is controlled by a pistol-grip R/C controller that had been modified to include a dev board and an XBee. For power, an aluminum enclosure was fabricated, strapped underneath the deck, and filled with LiPo batteries. While the build is mostly done, [Jeb] is thinking about scrapping it and moving onto version 2, the HeavyBoard. Check out the video of the board in action.

Two-axis Panning Time Lapse Rig Built From Lego

August 12, 2011 by Mike Nathan 14 Comments

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[Jochem] wrote in to share a neat time lapse camera dolly he constructed out of Lego bricks. He is a big fan of the two-axis panning time lapse effect where the camera moves while recording images. He figured it would be easy enough to construct one of his own, so he dug out his pail of Lego and got to work.

The rig consists of a stationary motor platform which pulls a movable sled using a simple gear and string. The motor platform is controlled by an Arduino, which pulls the movable sled along every so often, snapping pictures along the way. [Jochem’s] Nikon D80 supports shutter release via IR, so he programmed the Arduino to send a quick IR pulse each time it has finished moving the dolly.

The rig looks like it works pretty well as you can see by the video below, but [Jochem] says that it still needs a bit of work. We just can’t wait to see what other time lapse movies he puts together once he finds an “interesting” time lapse subject.

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