Slot Car Lap Timer/counter

June 17, 2011 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

For his first project using the TI Launchpad [VOJT4] built a lap timer and counter for slot cars. For us it’s always hardest to come up with the idea of what to build and we think he found a great one here.

Each time a car passes the finish line of the track it trips a reed switch that was hot glued to the underside of the track segment. Both reed switches have a capacitor to smooth out the inputs (is this acting as a hardware debounce?). The time and lap number are then pushed to a graphic LCD by the MSP430G2553.

You must be logged into the forum where [VOJT4] posted the project in order to see the images. Because of this, we’ve embedded them (including the schematic) after the break along with a demo video. But do take a look at his project thread to hear his thoughts and peruse the code he wrote.

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Blox That Play Back

June 14, 2011 by Nick Schulze 3 Comments

I’m sure most of us remember playing with blocks when we were kids, well now this age old children’s toy has been crammed full of electrical goodness by a team of Electrical Engineers from the University of Texas. The Blox, which are about the size of a standard Rubiks Cube each contain 16 IR sensors, 4 touch panels, a 3-axis accelerometer, a ZigBee Wireless Module, a 2″ OLED display and a battery, all controlled using an ARM Cortex processor.

The Blox show their full potential when used together as an interactive distributed computing system. Blox is an open source project so all of the build details, schematics and code can be found on the website. For an overview and demonstration of the Blox check out the video after the break.

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An Autonomous Car Using A “Webcam”

June 13, 2011 by Jeremy Cook 8 Comments

This autonomous remote control-style car from Cornell students was designed for a senior level engineering course there. It’s main “sensor” is a low-res webcam style camera. As shown in the video after the break, this car does quite well staying within two black lines on a white surface using it’s vision processing. It also has an IR sensor to detect objects in front of the car and stop without crashing.

All “vision” computations are handled by an Atmel Mega644 MCU, an 8-bit processor. Because of the processing limits of this chip, much work had to be done to make this process computationally efficient. These students go through an incredibly detailed account of their project, focusing on the code and electrical design. Check out the video of their car in action after the break. Continue reading “An Autonomous Car Using A “Webcam”” →

Tablet-controlled Disco Droid

June 9, 2011 by Mike Nathan 13 Comments

disco_droid_adk_control

We have seen a few neat Google ADK projects pop up since its announcement a few weeks back, and this one is already on the list of our favorites.

YouTube user [chrisjrelliot] has put together a great hack demonstrating the ADK’s power and how easy it can be to control devices in real time with an Android-powered device.

He hacked apart an Android figure (naturally) and fitted it with some LED eyes as well as four servos. The servos are used to rotate the head, body, and arms of his Disco Droid, all of which can be controlled via his Android-powered tablet. As you can see in the video below, he is able to control the Droid’s actions in real time with a few simple swipes of his finger. One thing we did notice is that his tablet is not connected to anything via wires, so we are assuming that there’s a Bluetooth module hidden away somewhere in the mix.

While the video is a bit short on details, [Chris] promises that source code and build plans will be published in short order.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwvkJVUECrg&w=470]

Electro-static See-saw

May 17, 2011 by Caleb Kraft 3 Comments

Many of you may have seen these fun little toys in museums or possibly even in school. Instructibles user [brazilero2008] takes us through the process of constructing one on our own.

Most of this toy are constructed from fairly household materials like foil, paper, straws etc. The fun part comes when you find the power supply. [brazilero2008] is using an air ionizer that he found at a rummage sale, though any high voltage DC source should work. He shares some tips on how to save time and effort creating the balls on the end by telling us how he did it the difficult way.

We admit this isn’t the most attention grabbing project, but we think it would be a fun educational weekend project.

Japanese Maid Mods A Furby

May 14, 2011 by Caleb Kraft 49 Comments

This video has been floating around the web recently and we thought that some of you might enjoy it. After a quick google search, we found out that this is [Julie Watai], a singer/model who also enjoys hardware modification. In this video, she’s doing a tutorial on how to circuit bend furbies. No, we have no idea why she is dressed like a maid. This immediately brought to mind that Bjork video we saw a few years ago. Enjoy.

Don’t Hit That Switch!

May 10, 2011 by Mike Nathan 44 Comments

switch_box

Hackaday reader [Danukeru] sent us a video featuring a box-based robot with an interesting personality. The box is fairly simple and from the outside seems to consist only of a switch and an LED. When the switch is flipped however, the box comes to life.

When the box is activated, the lid opens, and a small arm reaches out to turn the switch off. We’ve seen that plenty of times, but this one turns out to be a little different. In the video, this process seems to repeat a couple dozen times before the robot gets angry and flips out. At first we thought that the end portion of the video was done with a bit of digital trickery, but after reviewing the creator’s blog, it looks like it could be legit. It is very hard to see the box’s innards in the video, but it does house a remote control car chassis that allows it to move around and spin out, as seen below.

It’s a pretty neat project, and if you can handle reading the creator’s site via Google translate, there is plenty of picture documentation of the build process for your perusal.

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