A 12" LCD screen sits between speakers (on lower half of bezel) and joycon controllers are attached on the upper half of the bezel.

Portable Monitor Extension For Nintendo Switch

November 16, 2022 by Navarre Bartz 7 Comments

Handheld consoles are always a tradeoff between portability and screen real estate. [Pavlo Khmel] felt that the Nintendo Switch erred too much on the side of portability, and built an extension to embiggen his Switch. (YouTube)

[Khmel] repurposed a Dell XPS 12 LCD panel for the heart of this hack and attached it to an LCD controller board to serve as an external monitor for the Switch. A 3D printed enclosure envelops the screen and also contains a battery, speakers, and a dock for the console. Along the top edges, metal rails let you slide in the official Joy-Cons or any number of third party controllers, even those that require a power connection from the Switch.

Since the Switch sees this as being docked, it allows the console to run faster and at higher resolution than if it were in handheld mode. The extension lasts about 5 hours on battery power, and the Switch inside will still be fully charged if you don’t mind being constrained to its small screen while you charge it’s bigger-screened exoskeleton.

Need more portable goodness? Be sure to check out our other handheld and Nintendo Switch hacks.

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LEGO Race Car Simulator Is Like A Mechanical Arcade Game

November 14, 2022 by Lewin Day 6 Comments

We’ve all played some variant of that simple old racing video game. It’s the one that involves swerving around cars in front without crashing, as the pace steadily increases further. [Dr. Engine] has recreated that very game in the physical world, with the help of LEGO Technic.

The design uses what appears to be a LEGO tank tread to create a treadmill for a LEGO car. The initial design is hand-cranked, but [Dr. Engine] soon upgrades this with a motor. The wide treadmill is then fitted with a steering wheel. This steers the car laterally along the treadmill via a simple pulley system. From there, it was a simple job of adding gearbox to change the speed of the treadmill, and obstacles for the car to dodge. Double-sided table affixed small die-cast cars to the track to fit the theme of the build.

It’s great fun watching the car buck and weave over the undulating track, and we’d certainly love to compete with friends for the high score. We’ve seen similar builds before, too, like this all-LEGO suspension dyno. Video after the break.

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A Muppet On A Tricycle

November 12, 2022 by Abe Connelly 10 Comments

[Donald Bell] wanted to recreate the magic of seeing Kermit on a tricycle from a 2018 NY Maker Faire he attended, so he created his own take of a Muppet on a Radio Flyer kids tricycle bike.

He started by attaching a ready made puppet to a classic Radio Flyer dual deck toddler tricycle using zip ties and split pipe insulation to give the limbs stiffness. [Donald] then put all the electronics, including the 12 V 50 RPM DC motor, 24 V 22.4 Ah Li-Ion battery pack, TB67H420FTG motor driver, and the Arduino Uno microcontroller under the back axle.

The motor transfers power to one of the back wheels via pulleys and timing belts with an additional ASMC-04B 24 V servo used to steer the tricycle via a steel pushrod. The RC communication is done with a FlySky FS-GT2 2.4 GHz 2-channel system. [Donald] gives a detailed list of parts that he uses in a Google doc for anyone wanting to know more.

[Donald] goes into great length about the limitations of the build, including the low clearance of the electronics underneath, the finicky nature of the timing belts and the “uncanny valley” that the size of the puppet induces to a casual observer. Regardless, the build is exceptional and paves the way for a variety of improvements for anyone wanting to extend the idea either further into the creepy or cute domain.

Retrofitting vehicles with motorized control are a crowd favorite, as seen with some projects like a stroller controller from Maker Faires of the past.

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Concrete Boat Cements Its Way To High Speeds

November 11, 2022 by Ryan Flowers 12 Comments

Steel is scarce. Wood is not an option. And you need a boat now. These wartime circumstances drove innovation in all kinds of crazy directions, and one somewhat less crazy direction — concrete boats. As [Peter Sripol] demonstrates in the video below the break, making an RC concrete boat isn’t hard. Making a fast one on the other hand is. But that didn’t stop him from trying, and we think the effort deserves a look.

Starting with a basic displacement style hull, [Peter] and his cohorts experimented with a simple RC boat that worked, but could only move at slow speeds. They turned things up a notch or two and instead modeled their concrete boat after an RC speedboat hull that they had on hand.

The construction methods left a lot to be desired though, and they even tried various wire meshes as rebar, but they proved too heavy. Eventually though, they got a working hull, and had some fun with it. Rather than try to make the hull watertight with a rudder and propeller, they opted for a ducted fan and an airboat style rudder to make what they call the “world’s fastest concrete boat”.

Whether it’s the fastest or not is unconfirmed, but it is fast and actually gets on step fairly nicely. We applaud the exploration of alternative materials and the experimentation with different build methods. If building things with concrete floats your boat, then be sure to check out this concrete pinhole camera.

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This Wii Has An Apple M1 Inside

November 9, 2022 by Navarre Bartz 8 Comments

The conveniently tiny logic board of the M1 Mac mini has lead to it giving the Mini ITX format a run for its money in case mods. The latest example of this is [Luke Miani]’s M1 Wii. (Youtube via 9to5Mac)

[Miani] chose the Wii as a new enclosure for this Mac mini given its similar form factor and the convenient set of doors in the top to maintain access to the computer’s I/O, something he wasn’t able to do with one of his previous M1 casemods. The completed build is a great stealth way to have a Mac mini in your entertainment center. [Miani] even spends the last several minutes of the video showing the M1 Wii running Wii, GameCube, and PS2 games to really bring it full circle.

A Microsoft Surface power brick was spliced into the original Wii power cable since the Wii PSU didn’t have enough wattage to supply the Mac mini without significant throttling. On the inside, the power runs through a buck converter before making its way to the logic board. While the Mini’s original fan was too big to fit inside the Wii enclosure, a small 12V fan was able to keep performance similar to OEM and much higher than running the M1 fanless without a heat spreader.

If you’d like to see some more M1 casemods, check out this Lampshade iMac or the Mac Mini Mini.

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End Of An Era, As LEGO To Discontinue Mindstorms

November 3, 2022 by Jenny List 46 Comments

When there are so many single board computers and other products aimed at providing children with the means to learn about programming and other skills, it is easy to forget at time before the Arduino or the Raspberry Pi and their imitators, when a computer was very much an expensive closed box.

Into this late-’90s vacuum left in the wake of the 8-bit home computer revolution came LEGO’s Mindstorms kits, a box of interlocking goodies with a special programmable brick, which gave kids the chance to make free-form computerized robotic projects all of their own. The recent news that after 24 years the company will discontinue the Mindstorms range at the end of the year thus feels like the end of an era to anyone who has ridden the accessible microcontroller train since then.

What became Mindstorms has its roots in the MIT Media Lab’s Programmable Brick project, a series of chunky LEGO bricks with microcontrollers and the Mindstorms LEGO brick contacts for motors and sensors. Their Logo programming language implementation was eschewed by LEGO in favor of a graphical system on a host computer, and the Mindstorms kit was born. The brand has since been used on a series of iterations of the controller, and a range of different robotics kits.

In 1998, a home computer had morphed from something programmable in BASIC to a machine that ran Windows and Microsoft Office. Boards such as Parallax’s BASIC Stamp were available but expensive, and didn’t come with anything to control. The Mindstorms kit was revolutionary then in offering an accessible fully programmable microcontroller in a toy, along with a full set of LEGO including motors and sensors to use with it.

We’re guessing Mindstorms has been seen off by better and cheaper single board computers here in 2022, but that doesn’t take away its special place in providing ’90s kids with their first chance to make a proper robot their way. The kits have found their place here at Hackaday, but perhaps most of the projects we’ve featured using them being a few years old now underlines why they are to meet their end. So long Mindstorms, you won’t be forgotten!

Header image: Mairi, (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Exploring Piston Engine Design With LEGO

November 1, 2022 by Danie Conradie 16 Comments

When learning about the design of a machine or mechanism, reading and watching videos is certainly effective, but it’s hard to beat hands-on experimentation. In the video after the break, [Brick Technology] uses LEGO to gain some practical insight into the world of piston engine design, from single-cylinder all the way up to radial twelve-cylinder engines.

Using pneumatic cylinders from the LEGO Technic series, [Brick Technology] starts by getting the basics working with a single-cylinder design. Besides the fact that there are no fuel-air explosions involved, these pistons are also double-acting thanks to a valve mechanism that switches the pressurized side of the piston as it reaches the end of its stroke. After a couple of experiments, he settles on using a bank of six two liter soda bottles as a source of pressurized air.

He also increased the performance of the LEGO cylinders by drilling out the ports and adding silicon oil for lubrication. In the initial prototypes, the cylinders also acted as connecting rods, tilting back and forth as the crankshaft rotates. After some testing, he discovered he could increase efficiency by constraining the cylinder with a slider mechanism and adding a separate connecting rod.

With the basics done, [Brick Technology] could start experimenting with engine arrangements and geometry. Inline two, three, and four cylinders and V2, V6, V8, and even R12 were all on the menu. He could also change crankshaft geometry to trade torque for RPM and vice versa, and build a starter motor, and torque generator.

Just like [Brick Technology]’s LEGO electronic drums and vortex machine, this video gives us a itch that can only be scratched by a few hundred LEGO pieces. For rapid prototyping of course.