Building A Pirate Cannon For Fun And Plunder

December 4, 2012 by Mike Szczys 35 Comments

Our days by the pool are behind us for the year. But playing pirate ship with a 2-year-old does sound like quite a bit of fun. That’s why [The Stone Donkey] built this pirate cannon prop complete with firing sounds.

The simplicity of the design is pretty brilliant. Three segments of PVC and five fittings make for a realistic looking barrel that won’t throw your back out when you pull this one out for playtime. After some cutting and gluing the entire thing was sprayed with matte black paint. The bit of rope wrapped around the barrel is a nice touch. The base was made with some scrap pine, but it’s that little wooden box on top that makes it really special. It is the fuse box, and a tap of the finger gives a burning fuse sound and video followed by an earth-shattering kaboom. [The Stone Donkey] used his old Droid X Android phone and wrote an app for it that puts on the sound and light show. Take a look in the clip after the break.

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Turning Four Smaller Helicopters Into One Larger Quadcopter

December 3, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

copter

There’s a reason we’ve seen a menagerie of quadcopters over the past few years – the key piece of any quadcopter build is an inertial measurement unit. Historically a very complicated and expensive piece of kit, these IMUs came down in price a few years back, allowing anyone with a few dollars in their pocket and a handful of brushless motors to build a four-bladed drone in their workshop.

[Starlino] built a few quadcopters, but he wanted to shy away from IMUs and get most of the mass of his new ‘copter over the center of the chassis. He came up with a design he calls the quadhybrid that can be built out of a quartet of those cheap 3-channel helicopter toys.

Most of the lift for [Starlino]’s quadhybrid comes from a pair of coaxial rotors from a Syma 001 3-channel helicopter toy. Anyone who has played with one of these toy helicopters knows how stable they are; if the tail rotor breaks, you’re left with a helicopter that can only go up and down.

To give his quadhybrid a few degrees of freedom, he attached four tail rotors from 3-channel helis to a few booms laid out in a cross pattern. By taking the receiver out of a 4-channel helicopter and adding his own controller board, [Starlino] made each of the tail rotors control the pitch and roll of the craft.

In the video after the break, you can see the quadhybrid is amazingly stable even without an IMU and surprisingly agile. As [Starlino]’s ‘copter can be made out of replacement parts for cheap 3-channel helis, we’ll expect a rush on these tail motors at your favorite online RC retailer very shortly.

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Coin-op Sega Rally Used To Race RC Cars

November 30, 2012 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

Head to head video game action can’t even compare to this use of a coin-op Sega Rally game to race actual RC vehicles. Take a close look at those screens and you’ll see there are no computer graphics, just a feed for a camera on each of the toy cars.

The project was conceived for the Sapo Codebits VI conference in Portugal. The arcade cabinets had their controls connected to an Arduino, but getting video up and running wasn’t nearly as easy. After fruitless attempts to get the original CRTs to work the team ended up replacing them with functioning CRT units of the same size. The cars themselves have two camera, one on top of the vehicle’s cab and one mounted on a boom for a perspective that was above and behind the vehicle. The drivers can switch between either view. The cars were set loose in the room serving as the event’s retro gaming area and players were free to race each other wherever they pleased. Don’t miss the video clip after the break which shows off all of the fun. Continue reading “Coin-op Sega Rally Used To Race RC Cars” →

RC Truck Has Working Windows, Steering Wheel, And Much More

November 27, 2012 by Mike Szczys 23 Comments

This truck is not simply a drive train and a radio module. Great care was taken to fabricate every part to work like a full-sized vehicle. NSFW WARNING: The forum on which the details have been posted is Russian and may have sidebar ads you don’t want on your screen at work. That being said, here’s the link (translated).

The build starts with a custom-made frame which looks like it’s aluminum. The gearbox is assembled from a huge number of parts, with power is transferred to the wheels through a proper differential. But hey, why not go that extra mile? The rope and hook hanging off the front are connected to a functional winch. The doors have windows that crank down, the steering wheel moves when the wheels turn, and where would this thing be without windshield wipers and headlights? Don’t miss the pair of demo videos after the break.

We remember seeing a pretty neat stirling engine come out of the same forums earlier this year.

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Electronically Augmented Foosball Brings Competition To The Office

November 26, 2012 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

This office has a Foosball league that automatically tallies and posts the standings for each employee. This is thanks to all of the extra electronics that were added to the Foosball table in the break room.

The system is connected to the internet via WiFi. This allows it to store the final results of each game for use on the leader board. Player first identify themselves to the system using the RFID tag embedded in their employee badge (normally used to open doors in the building). From there the game play proceeds much like you’d expect, but the scoring is handled automatically. Each goal has a laser pointed across it which is broken when the ball passes through. But there are a pair of arcade buttons in case of a scoring error.

Standings are listed at the webpage linked above. There’s even functionality for new employees to registers through this page. Don’t miss a glimpse of the build in the clip after the break.

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$5 Toy Car Upgraded To Record The Ride In HD

November 26, 2012 by Mike Szczys 14 Comments

We hope [Kabir’s] driving skills are top-notch because the camera stuck to the front of this toy is a high-ticket item. It’s ironic, since the donor toy for this hacked RC car only cost about five bucks. It had been gathering dust in the dark reaches of his bedroom until he sat down and gave it a proper upgrade.

He started the project by getting rid of the stock battery and moving to a pair of Lithium Polymer cells. They give the vehicle more power and more than twice the running time between charges. A couple of springs were added to the suspension system for a smoother ride. Turning had been a problem since the original design offered no control over how far the wheels turn. You can just make out the body of the servo motor he rolled into the system to allow for more precise turning.

The most recent addition is the HackHD camera on the front of the vehicle. It records to an SD card rather than streaming the video in real-time. Check out the clip after the break to see the interesting perspective achieved by filming so low to the ground. The one thing we would add is a cage around that board which retails at around $165.

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Making A Touchless Vibrator With Reverse Engineering

November 25, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 135 Comments

Here’s one for the ladies (and men, we guess) out there.

[Beth] recently bought a LELO Lyla vibrator for herself, but found operating this wireless vibrator to be an exercise in mood-killing awkwardness. Wanting a more natural interface, she decided to reverse engineer a remote control vibrator. Here’s a cache; [Beth]’s blog has been up and down all day.

The LELO Lyla comes with a wireless control in the form of a neon pink remote. [Beth] thought this remote was a little clunky and felt like programming a VCR – something she doesn’t like in a sex toy. With the goal of improving this remote and allowing for a better user experience, [Beth] tore down this remote and began to build her own.

The new vibrator remote would have to be touchless – there’s nothing that kills the mood faster than mashing buttons. By using ultrasonic sensors, [Beth] would be able to control the intensity of her vibrator by simply waving her hand; a much more natural interface. With the control interface out of the way, the only thing left to do was to figure out how to control the business end of the vibrator.

The remote for a stock LELO Lyla comes with a MSP430 microcontroller and a 2.4 GHz CC2500 radio controlled over an SPI interface. Instead of disassembling the microcontroller and figuring out the firmware from scratch, [Beth] decided to sniff the SPI bus and make her own controller.

After attaching some 0.1″ headers to the stock remote and soldering a few wires to the microcontroller, [Beth] captured the SPI data with a Propeller dev board. By streaming the SPI traffic to a terminal, she was able to figure out exactly how the remote works and set out on building her own.

The new remote was built out of an Arduino Pro Mini, ultrasonic sensor, CC2500 radio and a four digit 7-segment display. After printing an enclosure, [Beth] had a very easy to use, hands free vibrator.

In the video after the break you can see [Beth]’s vibrator in action. She’s still looking for a few more ways to improve it such as predicting the movements of her hand with a phase-locked loop, but for now we’ll just tip our hat to [Beth] for a very awesome hack.

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