Wooden Quadcopter Body

September 30, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 3 Comments

brings back memories of balsa wood gliders

[Greasetattoo] shares the process of building his wooden quadcopter body that won 2nd place in the Minnesota state fair. His plans were purchased as a kit back in 1999, but he never got around to actually building them. The original plans called for a foam board body, but he felt that a wooden piece of art would be much nicer. This build isn’t focusing on the electronics, they’re just a kit from Mikrokopter. Instead, it is a log of the entire process of making the beautiful wooden body. He really put some nice detail in there from the layered and nicely finished dome to the little oak sleeves for his motors. Great job [Greasetattoo].

Autonomous Rover Roams The Halls

September 19, 2010 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

[ESylin] built an autonomous rover that roams the vacant halls of his school. On the hood of the vehicle he’s mounted two Maxbotix sonar sensors that do a great job of keeping the vehicle centered in the hallway. It will follow a wall around a corner (favoring its left side because of the left-facing sensor) and it will stop to correct itself if it gets off course. That’s because when you’re not driving a dsPIC33 is, with a Traxxas XL-5 speed controller and a hobby servo for steering. But this little guy hasn’t lost all his pep. Manual control and be switched on from from an R/C controller so you can burn up the floor tiles. Take a look at the demo after the break, with the manual control demo shown at about 4:10. Continue reading “Autonomous Rover Roams The Halls” →

LEGO Host For All Of Your Prototyping Projects

September 13, 2010 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

[Deadbird] decided to use a LEGO 8880 Super Car as a host for all of his electronic tinkering. Throughout his blog (translated) you’ll find the vehicle with an Arduino MEGA interfacing various prototyping bits. It starts with the motors for locomotion, closely followed by a servo for steering. From there we see the addition of a breadboard and graphic LCD screen. So far he’s worked out the use of a PS2 keyboard as a controller and, most recently he’s interfaced a Wii Nunchuck.

We’re more used to seeing NXT kits adapted for wider use, but if you’ve got a nice kit like this one it makes a great base onto which you can add your own robotic elements.

Spy Video TRAKR: Software And First Hack

September 2, 2010 by Phil Burgess 23 Comments

Our initial view of the Spy Video TRAKR “App BUILDR” site had us believing this would be an internet-based code editor and compiler, similar to the mbed microcontroller development tools. Delving deeper into the available resources, we’re not entirely sure that’s an accurate assessment — TRAKR may well permit or even require offline development after all. Regardless of the final plan, in the interim we have sniffed out the early documentation, libraries and standalone C compiler and have beaten it into submission for your entertainment, in order to produce our first TRAKR hack!

Continue reading “Spy Video TRAKR: Software And First Hack” →

Floating Globe, Hacked To Rotate

August 31, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 56 Comments

they need to hire this guy

[Alexy Sha] has done this fantastic hack, where he modified a magnetic floating globe to be motorized and spin on a tilted axis. The original globe was simply levitating via a magnet mounted inside. Though you could spin it by hand, it wasn’t motorized, and actually floated completely vertically instead of being tilted.

[Alexy] wanted to take this idea further and make it automatically spin on a rotated axes. He built a rotation assembly that was basically a motor, hung off-center, attached at the center of the globe. He had to power it via a coil hidden in the base unit, so that it could remain light enough to float. He did a fantastic job and the final product seems like it is the true way it should have been sold.

Check out a video of it in action after the break. We actually like the spinning ring, when he’s testing it, just as much as the final spinning globe.

Continue reading “Floating Globe, Hacked To Rotate” →

Controlling An AC Drill Using One PWM Connection

August 31, 2010 by Mike Szczys 22 Comments

This peculiar setup allows [Ben Krasnow] to control an alternating current device using one pin on a microcontroller. He’s experimenting with a power drill and has relocated the trigger circuitry that makes it spin. On that board he found a variable resistor combined with a capacitor which control a triac, actuating the speed of a drill. [Ben’s] solution works great and isolates the drill from the control circuitry. He replace the variable resistor with a cadmium sulfide photoresistor (basically a variable resistor whose resistance depends on the intensity of light). Pulse-width modulation is used to adjust the brightness of an LED shining on that photoresistor and thereby affect the speed of the drill. This is such as simple alteration to the drill we’d call it MacGyver-esque.

See a demonstration after the break.

Continue reading “Controlling An AC Drill Using One PWM Connection” →

Spy Video TRAKR: The Teardown

August 30, 2010 by Phil Burgess 44 Comments

Last Friday we looked at Wild Planet’s Spy Video TRAKR programmable RC vehicle mostly from an end user perspective. Much of our weekend was spent dismantling and photographing the device’s internal works, and poring over code and documentation, in order to better gauge the TRAKR’s true hackability. Our prior review included some erroneous speculation…we can clarify a number of details now, and forge ahead with entirely new erroneous speculation!

Continue reading “Spy Video TRAKR: The Teardown” →