Toy Hacks

976 Articles

Your Marble Machine Doesn’t Need To Change The World

March 21, 2015 by 21 Comments

It’s easy to get sucked into the increasing the complexity when sometimes the craftsmanship can be what makes the project. [Alex Weber] proves the point with his minimalist marble machine. There are no death-defying twists and turns, no convoluted path forks or overly-complex lifting mechanisms. This is about a clean and simple design that looks amazing whether running or stationary.

For the uninitiated, marble machines route marbles (or quite often steel ball bearings) through a set of paths usually guided by gravity for the delight of onlookers. Traditionally, making them complicated is the point. Take this offering which highlights years worth of marble machine builds all exercising different concepts. Sometimes they occupy entire rooms. We’ve seen them make a clock tick. And who can forget marble-based flip-flops that combine to form things like binary adders?

Have we scared you off from building these yourself yet? No, that’s the entire point of this one… it can be excruciatingly simple, while elegantly crafted. Check out the video demo below to see how one oval, one battery, and one motor have no problem bringing a smile to your face.

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Active “Dart-Sensing” Makes Your Nerf Gun Smarter

March 21, 2015 by 5 Comments

When choosing weapons to defend yourself in the next zombie apocalypse, dart jamming whilst firing your Nerf Gun can be a deal-breaker. This clogging is an issue with many “semi-automatic” Nerf Guns. When our trigger-happy fingertips attempt to shoot a dart that hasn’t finished loading into the firing chamber, the halfway-loaded dart folds onto itself and jams the chamber from firing any more darts. The solution, as intended by Nerf, would be to open the chamber lid and manually clear the pathway. The solution, according to [Technician Gimmick], however, is active sensing, and the resulting “smart” dart gun is the TR-27 GRYPHON.

To prevent jamming from occurring altogether, [Technician Gimmick] added a trigger-disable until the dart has fully loaded into the firing chamber. An IR LED, harvested from a mouse scroll wheel, returns an analog value to the microcontroller’s analog-to-digital converter, allowing it to determine whether or not a dart is ready for firing. The implementation is simple, but the results are fantastic. No longer will any gun fire a dart until it has completely entered the chamber.

The TR-27 GRYPHON isn’t just a Nerf Gun that enables “smart” dart sensing. [Technician Gimmick] folded a number of other features into the Nerf Gun that makes it a charmer on the shelf. First, a hall-sensor array identifies the current cartridge loaded into the Nerf Gun and it’s carrying capacity. To display this value and decrement appropriately, [Technician Gimmick] added a dual-seven segment display, a trick we’ve seen before. Finally, a whopping 3S LiPo battery replaces the original alkaline batteries, and the voltage-reducing diodes have been cropped, enabling a full 12.6 Volt delivery to the motors at full charge.

We’re glad to see such a simple trick go such a long way as to almost entirely eliminate Nerf dart jams. For all those braving the Humans-Versus-Zombies frontier this season, may this clever trick keep you alive for just a bit longer.

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SnowSled

Uber-Cheap FPV Snow Sled

March 20, 2015 by 15 Comments

Has the winter blues got you RC vehicle guys down? Well, cheer up! Spring is just around the corner. In the meantime though, you can take a page out of [BenNBuilds’] book and build an FPV Snow Sled.

So how is using this Snow Sled in the winter different from any other RC vehicle? [BenNBuilds] controls it from inside his house where he stays warm and toasty. The on-board FPV camera sends video back to a receiver in the house where it can be either displayed on an LCD screen or on FPV goggles. Plus, being able to see the sled from the window doesn’t hurt either when getting in a sticky situation!

The craft it self was made on the cheap from spare parts that were kicking around. The frame is made from foam board and is powered by a ducted electric fan. A rudder similar to that of a hovercraft or swamp boat provides the steering. Since [BenNBuilds’] transmitter had a couple extra channels, he hooked up a pan and tilt system for his FPV camera. Check out the video of this puppy in action after the break….

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Machining A Yo-Yo With Speed Holes

March 19, 2015 by 55 Comments

A while ago, [Gord] received a notice from his daughter’s school looking for silent auction donations for a fundraiser. It’s pretty much a bake sale, only [Gord] gets to build something. He has a pretty nice machine shop, and eventually settled on building a pair of beautiful vacillating vertical pendulums. They’re yo-yos, in case you were wondering what that meant.

Each half is cut out of a 2.5″, with both sides of each half faced off and tapped. From there, eighteen speed holes shave off 22 grams of weight. The sides of the yo-yo are shaved down to a thickness of half an inch, a 14° bevel is put on each face, the edges are chamfered at 30°, and everything is polished up.

Sending a bare metal yo-yo to a raffle is apparently a little uncouth, so [Gord] anodized each half of the yo-yos in a bath of sulfuric acid, then applied dye to the surface. With everything assembled, a fancy glass and metal case was constructed and a certificate of authenticity printed out. It’s a brilliant final touch to a great project, we just wish we knew how the yo-yo performed.

Thanks [Chris] for sending this in.

diy rc hovercraft

DIY RC Hovercraft Makes Batman Action Figure Envious

January 28, 2015 by 4 Comments

[Bauwser] had some spare RC Helicopter parts laying around and cobbled together an RC Hovercraft. It worked but not to his liking. That’s okay though, he know it was just a prototype for what was to come; a fully scratch built hovercraft with parts spec’ed out specifically to make it handle the way [Bauwser] wanted.

He started out by sketching out some cool faceted shapes that would both look good and be easy to construct. Sheets of a light but rigid foam were then cut into the appropriate shapes and glued together to create a three-dimensional body. The foam was then covered with a layer of fiberglass and resin to add some strength. A hole was cut in the body to mount a 55mm ducted fan which provides the required air to fill the skirt and lift the vehicle. Another ducted fan is mounted at the back of the craft and points rearward. This ducted fan provides the forward thrust and a servo vectors this fan in order to make turns.

[Bauwser] sewed the skirt himself. It is made out of an old beach tent. The fabric is extremly light and flexible, perfect for a hovercraft. During the test runs, dirt and debris was getting trapped in the skirt tube. A quick trip back to the sewing machine to add some gauze netting fixed that problem and keeps debris collection to a minimum. In the end, [Bauwser] shows what a great DIY RC build can look like with a little planning and experimentation.

Need more DIY RC hovercrafts? Check this out…

Video after the break…

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Making Membrane Keypads From Scratch

January 25, 2015 by 28 Comments

A few years ago, [Paul]’s son got a simple electronic toy that plays funny noises and sings to him. The son loves the toy, but after months and months of use, the toy was inevitably broken beyond repair. Figuring an ‘electronic box that plays sounds’ wouldn’t be a hard project to replicate, [Paul] set out on making his own. The electronics weren’t hard, but custom membrane keypads are hard to come by. No matter, because it’s actually pretty easy to build your own.

Membrane switches are usually made with silkscreen conductive inks on fancy plastic, but that’s not a requirement to build your own. All you really need are four layers – a ‘front decal’, a ‘top foil’ layer for the rows, a ‘bottom foil’ layer for the columns, and a ‘cutout’ layer that provides enough separation between the rows and columns.

[Peter] laid out the four layers in Illustrator, printed the layers, and covered the rows and columns with copper tape. The cutout layer is the crucial part that keeps the layers separated until the button is pressed, and that was just a piece of card stock with strategically placed holes.

Once the rows, columns, and other layers were glued up, [Peter] could connect this keypad up to a microcontroller. The code is very easy with the Arduino keypad library, and should stand up to the rigors of being handled by a child.

baby holding IC chip

Ask Hackaday: Your Very First Microcontroller

January 22, 2015 by 79 Comments

Necessity is the mother of invention. It is also true that invention necessitates learning new things. And such was the case on the stormy Tuesday morning our story begins.  Distant echos of thunder reverberated in the small 8 x 16 workshop, drawing my attention to the surge suppressor powering my bench.  With only a few vacation days left, my goal of finishing the hacked dancing Santa Claus toy was far from complete. It was for a Secret Santa gift, and I wanted to impress. The Santa moved from side to side as it sang a song. I wanted to replace the song with a custom MP3 track. In 2008, MP3 players were cheap and ripe for hacking. They could readily be picked up at local thrift shops, and I had picked up a few. It soon became clear, however, that I would need a microcontroller to make it do what I wanted it to do.

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