How Does That Ship Get Into The Bottle?

June 4, 2013 by Caleb Kraft 3 Comments

Meet [Ray Gascoigne]. He’s a ship builder. Well, he builds ships in bottles. He’s been doing it for years and years and years and you can see it in his hands. The details are fantastic on the ships, but I really love hearing about the tools. He talks about how much things have changed over the years from having to build your own specialized tiny drill bits from broken needles to being able to just walk right down to the store and buy some.

The part that I found most interesting is this video, as amazingly beautiful as it is, never shows the insertion and erection of a full ship.

Moostar — Fortune Telling Moose Knock-off Of Zoltar

May 27, 2013 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

Meet Moostar, the fortune-telling Moose inspired by Zoltar. You remember Zoltar, the coin operated fortune-teller who made [Tom Hanks] a rich movie star? Maybe you didn’t see that flick, but [Sketchsk3tch] did and he pulled this show piece together for a company-wide conference with relative ease.

If you’re good at choosing parts for your projects it makes things a lot simpler. He started with a singing Christmas moose, a mini plasma ball to act as the crystal ball, and somehow came across a collector’s basketball case which was the perfect size for the enclosure.

The electronics also came together remarkably well. He uses a thermal printer to spit out the fortunes — which are actually security tips for employees since that’s the dcpartment he works in. The coin acceptor is a Sparkfun part and he tried two ready made solutions to make the moose talk. The first is seen below and uses pre-recorded messages played by an Arduino Wave shield. This was improved upon by using an EMIC2 text-to-speech module that really opens up the moose’s range of chatter.

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Tamagotchi ROM Dump And Reverse Engineering

May 24, 2013 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

tamagotchi-rom-dump-and-reverse engineering

Often the true key to success is persistence and that holds true for this project which dumped the ROM from the current generation of Tamagotchi toys. If you’re a fan of learning the secrets built into consumer electronics — and you know we are — you’ll want to go back and watch the 24-minute lecture on Tamagotchi hacking which [Natalie Silvanovich] gave a 29C3 last year. She had made quite a bit of headway hacking the playable pods, but wasn’t able to get her hands on a full ROM dump from the General Plus chip on board processor. This update heralds her success and shares the details of how it was done.

As we learned form the video lecture it was a huge chore just to figure out what processor this uses. It turned out to be a 6502 core with a few other things built in. After prowling the manufacturer’s website she found example code for writing to Port A. She was then able to execute her own code which was designed to dump one byte of ROM at a time using the SPI protocol.

[Natalie] posted her code dump if you’re interested in digging through it. But as usual we think the journey is the most interesting part.

[Thanks Itay]

LEGO Jukebox Choses From Different CDs

May 11, 2013 by Mike Szczys 23 Comments

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Music used to be delivered on round plastic sheets called Compact Discs. [Ralph] still has some of them lying around which he used in his latest project. It’s a CD changer built out of LEGO pieces. It reminds us of the mid-century jukeboxes that changed out 45s on a record player.

You can’t tell from this image, but the entire disc changer build is shaped to sit atop a computer case. The system is built in two parts. There is a transport arm which moves left and right along the rack of CDs. It uses that black and white strip as an encoder to track its movement. It can reach in, grab a disc, and take it all the way down to the right where it drops it off in a staging area. The second part of the build now takes over, grabbing the disc from the staging holder and rotating it down into the CD tray of the PC. All of this is demonstrated after the jump.

If you’re like us you prefer digital delivery for your music. We haven’t crossed that watershed with video games yet and that’s why we still love this Xbox 360 disc changer hack.

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Measuring The Lifespan Of LEGO

April 19, 2013 by Mike Szczys 34 Comments

lifespan-of-LEGO

How many times can you put two LEGO pieces together and take them apart again before they wear out? The answer is 37,112. At least that’s the number established by one test case. [Phillipe Cantin] was interested in this peculiar question so he built the test rig above to measure a LEGO’s lifespan.

The hacked together apparatus is pretty ingenious. It uses two servo motors for testing, each driven by the Arduino which is logging the count on an SD card. One of the two white LEGO parts has been screwed onto an arm of the upper servo. That servo presses down onto the mating piece which is sitting inside that yellow band. Look close and you’ll realize the yellow is the handle end of an IC puller. When the post on the lower servo is moved toward one arm of the puller it grips the lower LEGO piece tightly so that the upper servo can pull the two apart. In addition to the assembly and disassembly step there’s a verification step which raises the mated parts so that a reflectance sensor can verify that they’re holding together. [Phillipe] let the rig run for ten days straight before the pieces failed.

Don’t miss his video description of the project after the break.

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Hacked Interactive R2D2 Controlled By Raspberry Pi

March 23, 2013 by Ryan Fitzpatrick 2 Comments

hacked-R2D2-controlled-by-raspberry-pi

Ah R2D2. Probably one of the most recognized little robots on the planet. There have to be a hundred different toys of R2 out there, but one of the more impressive is the 30th Anniversary Interactive edition. Complete with all kinds of bells and whistles, it’s about as realistic as they come. One Star Wars fan found himself in possession of a broken Interactive R2, and with his girlfriend’s birthday coming up, decided to do a little droid surgery to create the ultimate gift.

Giving Anakin a run for his money, all the controls for this R2 unit were custom built. A Raspberry Pi running Rasbian acts as the brain. Facial recognition was implemented using OpenCV. Voice commands in either English or Chinese were made possible by PocketSphinx. Some of the other features he included are: message recording and playback, ultrasonic distance detection, motion detection, wifi, and a rechargeable battery. Many of those features were included in the original toy, but since this unit was broken, had to be rebuilt from scratch.

In the end, it must have impressed his girlfriend – she’s now his wife. Good work Jedi. Check out some build photos and a video demonstration after the break.

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Futaba 10C Radio Modified For Spektrum Module Compatibility

March 21, 2013 by Ryan Fitzpatrick 4 Comments

futaba-radio-modified-to-fly-spektrum

The Futaba 10C radio (non-module version) is [Tom]’s transmitter of choice. Unfortunately, it isn’t compatible with the Spektrum DSM2 technology modules he wanted to use. So, being the crafty guy he is, he decided to hack it so it was.

Upon opening the Futaba transmitter, he realized that the non-module version of the 10C didn’t really seem that different than a module version. His transmitter just has a pcb hardwired in place where the modules would otherwise go. He soldered a 4 conductor audio jack to the unused pins on the pcb in the transmitter, then mounted it in the case with some J.B. Weld. He then wired and mounted the receiving jack in the module case. A small 6 inch audio cable bridges the two devices, and velcro holds them neatly together.

He discovered that certain modules have problems with the channels being out of order. Unless someone comes up with a firmware hack, there’s no way to remap the controls. So, some modules are just not compatible. [Tom] gives a very nice video walkthrough after the break. Check it out.

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