Face Tracking In Opera

April 30, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 4 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ioV2Dj56iw]

Inspired by this year’s april fools day joke from Opera, [Jason] has made facial gesture recognition actually work. While this may seem like a silly project, it could seriously help some people out. This could be a great accessibility tool for people with motor control limitations.He states that it has some problems right now, most notably a performance issue with extended use, so he’s hoping to get some input from some bright minds.

[thanks, Jordan]

Twittering Toots, A Chair’s Perspective

April 13, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 28 Comments

We might have to add a category of “stuff made to twitter”. The latest installment is an office chair that twitters whenever it gets farted on. The author has a smart sounding description as to why he decided to make this, and he has a pretty good point about twittering interrupting the things you’re twittering about, but it all boils down to the fact that he wants to twitter his farts. We can’t say that we didn’t expect something along these lines. He has mounted a natural gas sensor in his chair, along with a squidbee wireless transceiver. You can download all the code as well as see the construction in the instructable. You can also follow his flatulent adventures on the twitter account of the office chair.

Mobius Circuit

February 4, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 33 Comments

[flickr video=3252983302]

We don’t want your brains to explode, so just trust us that this is a truly one sided circuit. Being a mobius strip means that this circuit has uber geek bragging rights. Beware, your friends who have never heard of a mobius strip will argue until they are blue in the face that there are two sides to it. The circuit they chose was fairly appropriate, an LED “chaser”.

Road Sign Hacking

January 24, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 158 Comments

We’ve all seen these on the side of the road and wondered how we could change the message. It turns out that it is actually pretty easy. There’s a keypad inside for programming that is often still set with a default password of “DOTS”. Even if the password has been changed, you can reset it right there pretty quickly. We shouldn’t even need to warn you that it is illegal to tamper with these, so unless there really are zombies ahead, you probably shouldn’t mess with it.

[via Neatorama]

Leyden Jar Of DOOM.

January 24, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 14 Comments

layden

A leyden jar is basically just a simple home made capacitor. We’ve shown you how to make them before. This, however, is how you make a ridiculously large one. [Nickademuss] used a five gallon bucket to make his leyden jar. That’s five whole gallons of lightning. The video, which you can see after the break, shows it light up the entire room when it lets out a fairly formidable spark. This is dangerous folks, be careful.

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Automated Shooting Range

January 22, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 28 Comments

targets

[Steve] was discussing airsoft with a friend when he came up with this idea. His friend was lamenting the lack of “action” style targets for their airsoft hobby. [Steve] took this as an opportunity to make his own automated target system. The targets themselves are made from Construx, a paper target and a piece of cloth to stop the airsoft pellets. Controlled by an Arduino and an ioBridge module, it has a web interface so he can switch programs from up range. You can see a video example of him shooting some targets after the break. Next,he should make it twitter where each target was hit.

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Refillable CO2 Cartridges

December 31, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 27 Comments

co2

For those who use these little cartridges, you know how quickly the price can add up. [steve] takes us through the process of adding a valve to a spent cartridge so it can be refilled. Over all, it doesn’t seem too difficult, and [steve] offers lots of tips to increase longevity and reliability. It isn’t very often that we show a hack here that doesn’t involve some kind of electronics, so take a break from the resistors and microprocessors for a moment and enjoy.

[thanks Wolf]