Toy Hacks

1018 Articles

Toy Dash Turned Gaming Interface

August 30, 2017 by 15 Comments

We see a lot of MAME cabinets and other gaming emulator projects here on Hackaday, but it’s not often that we see one the form factor of which so elegantly matches the ROM. [circuitbeard] converted a Tomy Turnin Turbo toy dashboard into a mini arcade machine playing Outrun.

There are many fascinating details in [circuitbeard]’s writeup. His philsophy is to “keep it looking stock” so he went to great lengths to add functionality to various elements of the toy without changing its appearance. The gear shifter was turned into a 3-way momentary switch with high and low speeds at top and bottom, with rubber bands pulling the switch back the center (neutral) when he lets go of it. The original toy’s steering wheel mounts to a slide potentiometer. The dash has a working ignition switch that uses a PowerBlock to manage the safe startup and shutdown of the Pi.  The dash also lights up the way you’d expect, and even displays accurate MPG and rev info.

For more MAME goodness here on Hackaday, see this broken tablet turned into a mini MAME cabinet or the portable MAME system of the future

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A Disc Shooter For When Rubber Bands Or Nerf Darts Aren’t Enough

August 25, 2017 by 27 Comments

There are times in everybody’s life when they feel the need to shoot at things in a harmless manner. For those moments there are rubber bands and Nerf darts, but even then they feel like mere toys. If that is the point at which you find yourself, then maybe [Austin]’s home-made electric disc shooter can help.

Operation of the shooter is simple enough. A stack of 3D-printed plastic discs is loaded into a tubular magazine, from which individual disks are nudged by a motor-driven cam controlled by the trigger. Once the disc leaves the magazine it reaches a vacuum cleaner belt driven by a much more powerful motor, that accelerates the disc to ejection velocity.

The video below the break shows the gun’s construction, as well as a sequence involving the destruction of plenty of balloons, soda cans, and food items. The 3D-printed ammunition seems to us to be the weak link as in our experience it is inevitable that there is a high ammunition loss rate with these type of weapons, but maybe [Austin] has a line on some cheap filament. Either way, his disc gun looks like the kind of toy that could provide an entertaining diversion for many readers.

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Remote Controlled Nerf Bomb

August 24, 2017 by 10 Comments

There was a third-party multiplayer upgrade pack for one of the Quake games back in the ’90s that included a whole slew of non-standard weapons. Among them one of the most memorable was a gravity well, that when thrown into the middle of a crowded room full of warring players would suck them into a vortex. Assuming its user had made it to safety in time, they would then be left the victor. The hyper-violent make-believe world of a first-person shooter is probably best left in a Pentium server from the ’90s, with few direct parallels in the real world. Maybe laser tag, or Nerf battles, are the closest you’ll get.

If you are a Nerf enthusiast, then you’ll appreciate [Giaco Whatever]’s CO2-powered remote-control Nerf bomb as an analogue of that Quake gravity well. It fires twelve darts at the press of a button on an infra-red remote control. The firing tubes sit in a nicely machined manifold connected via a solenoid valve to a little CO2 gas bottle. In the hectic world of a Nerf war it is slid out into the field of combat, its operator takes cover, and the other participants are showered in foam darts. There are probably kids who would sell their grandparents to own this device.

The build is detailed in the video below the break, along with a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek movie segment demonstrating it in action.

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PiCorder: Raspberry Pi Stands In For Stone Knives And Bearskins

August 18, 2017 by 26 Comments

In a classic episode of Star Trek, Spock attempts to get data from a tricorder while stuck in the 1930s using what he described as “stone knives and bearskins.” In reality, he used vacuum tubes, several large coils, and a Jacob’s ladder. Too bad they weren’t in the year 2017. Then Spock could have done like [Directive0] and used a Raspberry Pi instead. You can see the result in the video below.

The build starts with a Diamond Select Toys model tricorder. The Raspberry Pi, a battery, a TFT screen, and a Pi Sense Hat make up the bulk of the build.

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Wooden domino row setup machine

Wooden Domino Laying Machine

August 12, 2017 by 17 Comments

[Matthias Wandel]  has come up with another awesome machine, this time a machine that sets up neat rows of dominos. If you’ve followed [Matthias]’s work over the years then you’ll know that this is a wooden version of one he made out of LEGO® back in 2009.

In true [Matthias] fashion he uses just the one motor both for moving the machine along and for pushing the dominos in place. Not satisfied with that efficient use of parts, the rubber band belts that transfer rotation from the motor shaft to the wheels (bearings) double as the rubber surfaces for those wheels. One of many joys from watching [Matthias] work is seeing how he forms wood into shapes that most people would have trouble sculpting from clay. In this case he does this when he needs parts for reaching over his domino magazine to hold a guide rail in place, and of course the parts are well-rounded and clean-looking.

You might also ask, where did he get all the wooden blocks for dominos? He made them of course, all 300 or so.

Be sure to check out the video below of both the build, and of it in action.

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Quick Robin! The Bat Keychain!

August 9, 2017 by 3 Comments

We don’t know if Batman has a keychain for the keys to the Bat mobile, the Bat copter, and all his other vehicles. But we are guessing if he did, it didn’t look like the one [krishnan793] picked up cheap. It had a little button that lit up some LEDs and played a little tune. [Krishnan] thought he could do better with an ESP8266. After chopping up some headphones and adding a LiPo battery, he wound up with an improved key chain you can see in the video below. The first video is the before video. The second is after the modification. Sure, it is only a small improvement on LEDs and a simple tune, but now it is hackable to do more interesting things if you want to take the trouble to do so.

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Make A Tesla Coil Winding Rig With K’Nex

August 6, 2017 by 3 Comments

Instructables user [birdycrazy] built a winding rig from a PVC pipe and a bunch of K’Nex. He had recently started a Tesla coil project and needed an efficient way to wind the secondary coil. All of the designs for DIY winding rigs he found on the Internet required parts he didn’t have or simply cost a bunch of money. Then he realized he’d been building with K’nex a lot, and why not build a tool to help him?

He ended up investing only his K’nex elements and a length of 4” PVC pipe for the project. He used a K’nex 12V motor because it plugs in rather than requiring batteries. After the coil had been completely wound he set it to rotate the assembly over a period of several days while the varnish coating dried.

[birdycrazy] has several cool K’nex projects including a couple of automatic transmissions and a differential, all made with the toy. Also be sure to check out the K’nex whiteboard plotter, the Citadel monster K’nex castle, and the K’nex skeeball table we published in the past.