"Stomach Shot" lets you see through your zombie corpse.

“Stomach Shot” Halloween Costume

November 11, 2014 by Marsh 12 Comments

Halloween may have come and gone, but [Luis] sent us this build that you’ll want to check out. An avid Walking Dead fan, he put in some serious effort to an otherwise simple bloody t-shirt and created this see-through “stomach shot” gunshot wound.

The project uses a Raspi running the Pi Camera script to feed video from a webcam on the back of his costume to a 7″ screen on the front. [Luis] attached the screen to a GoPro chest harness—they look a bit like suspenders—to keep it centered, then built up a layer of latex around the display to hide the hard edges and make it more wound-like. Power comes from a 7.4V hobby Lipo battery plugged into a 5V voltage converter.

After ripping a small hole in the back of his t-shirt for the webcam and a large hole in the front for the screen, [Luis] applied the necessary liberal amount of fake blood to finish this clever shotgun blast effect.

IPhone-Controlled Daft Punk Helmet

November 3, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 4 Comments

A few years ago, [Marc] had access to a really big, very expensive 3D printer. Daft Punk helmets were – and still are – extremely cool builds, so with a bit of modeling, [Marc] and his friend [Alex] put together a model and printed out a Daft Punk [Thomas] helmet with the intention of turning it into the keystone of a great costume. A few things got in the way, and the [Thomas] helmet was left on a shelf for a few years. Fast forward to a few months ago and [Marc] took up the project again. The result is a 3D printed Daft Punk helmet loaded up with 320 WS2811 LEDs.

The 3D printed helmet was modeled well and printed in polycarbonate, but with any extrusion-based printer, there will be ridges and layers to sand, fill, prime and paint. This task was delegated to another friend, [Shaggy], while [Marc] got busy on the electronics.

The LEDs for the visor and ‘earmuffs’ are WS2811 LEDs, but not the SMD versions we’re so used to seeing. These are 8mm through-hole LEDs mounted in a lasercut piece of acrylic. Control of the LEDs is done with a Teensy 3.1 with [Paul Stoffregen]’s OctoWS2811 library. With the matrix wired up, batteries installed, WiFi capability added, and the helmet painted (not chromed; that will probably happen later, though), [Marc] had a copy of the [Thomas] helmet controllable through an iPhone.

If you’d like to check out more of [Marc]’s work, we posted something on his RGB LED suit and pneumatic Star Trek doors a few years ago.

Video below.

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Nikes With Power Laces, Just In Time For Next Year

October 29, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 21 Comments

With the world’s first hoverboard being shown a few days ago, we’re on the verge of the fabulous world of tomorrow from Back to the Future. Hoverboards are cool, but there’s a wealth of other cool technology from the far-off year of 2015: Mr. Fusions, inflatable pizza, Dustbusters, and of course, Nikes with power laces. [Hunter] just built them, and with the right shoes, to boot.

[Hunter] is using the BttF-inspired Nike Air Mag shoes for this build, along with a few bits of electronics – an Arduino pro mini, a force sensing resistor, and a motor. The build began by carving out a notch in the back of the shoe for the electronics. A small bit of fishing line goes around the shoe, providing the power behind the power laces.

A force sensitive resistor under the heel of the insole tells the microcontroller when a foot is inside the shoe, and a rotary encoder on the motor shaft makes sure all the power lace cycles are the same. It’s not quite the same as the shoe seen on screen – the lower laces can’t be replicated and it’s certainly not as fast as the BttF shoes, but it does work, and as far as shoelaces are concerned, they work well.

Videos below.

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The ChronodeVFD Wristwatch

October 26, 2014 by Marsh 47 Comments

Not just another steampunk fashion statement, [Johngineer’s] ChronodeVFD wristwatch is as intricate as it is beautiful. Sure, we’ve seen our share of VFD builds (and if you want a crash course in vacuum fluorescent displays, check out Fran’s video from earlier this year) but we seldom see them as portable timepieces, much less ones this striking.

The ChronodeVFD uses a IVL2-7/5 display tube, which in addition to being small and low-current is also flat rather than rounded, and features a transparent backing. [Johngineer] made a custom board based around an AtMega88 and a Maxim DS3231 RTC (real time clock): the latter he admits is a bit expensive, but no one complains about left-overs that simplify your design.

The VFD runs off a Maxim MAX6920 12-bit shift register and is powered by a single alkaline AA battery. A rechargable NiMH would have been preferable, but the lower nominal voltage meant lower efficiency for his boost converters and less current for the VFD. [Johngineer] won’t get much more than 6-10 hours of life, but ultimately the ChronodeVFD is a costume piece not meant for daily wear. Swing by his blog for a number of high-res photos and further details on how he built the brass tubing “roll cage” enclosure as well as the mounts for the leather strap.

Your New Winter Hat Should Express Your Brain Waves Like A Neon Sign… Just Saying

October 20, 2014 by Sarah Petkus 6 Comments

We’ve seen a few cool hacks for mainstream commercial EEG headsets, but these are all a tad spendy for leisurely play or experimentation. The illumino project by [io] however, has a relatively short and affordable list of materials for creating your own EEG sensor. It’s even built into a beanie that maps your mental status to a colorful LED pompom! Now that winter is around the corner, this project is perfect for those of us who want to try on the mad scientist’s hat and look awesome while we’re wearing it.

How does all the neuro-magic happen? At the heart of [io’s] EEG project is a retired Thinkgear ASIC PC board by Neurosky. It comes loaded with fancy algorithms which amplify and process the different types of noise coming from the surface of our brain. A few small electrodes made from sheets of copper and placed in contact with the forehead are responsible for picking up this noise. The bridge between the electrodes and the Thinkgear is an arduino running the illumino project code. For [io’s] tutorial, a Tinylilly Arduino is used to mesh with the wearable medium, since all of these parts are concealed in the folded brim of the beanie.

In addition, a neat processing sketch is included which illustrates the alpha, beta, gamma, and other wave types associated with brain activity as a morphing ball of changing size and color. This offers a nice visual sense of what the Neurosky is actually reading.

If all of your hats lack pompoms and you can’t find one out in the ether that comes equipped, fear not… there is even a side tutorial on how to make a proper puff-ball from yarn. Sporting glowing headwear might be a little ostentatious for some of us, but the circuit in this project by itself is a neat point of departure for those who want to poke around at the EEG technology. Details and code can be found on the illumino Instructable.

Thanks Zack, for showing us this neat tutorial!

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3D Printing Goes Hand In Hand With Iron Man Inspired Prosthetic

October 17, 2014 by Sarah Petkus 10 Comments

It’s exciting how much 3D printing has enabled us to produce pretty much any shape for any purpose on the fly. Among the most thoughtful uses for the technology that we’ve seen are the many functioning and often beautiful prosthetics that not only succeed in restoring the use of a limb, but also deliver an air of style and self-expression to the wearer. The immediate nature of the technology allows for models to be designed and produced rapidly at a low-cost, which works excellently for growing children. [Pat Starace’s] Iron Man inspired 3D printed hand and forearm are a perfect example of such personality and expert engineering… with an added dash of hacker flair.

With over twenty years of experience in animatronics behind him, [Starace] expertly concealed all of the mechanical ligaments within the design of his arm, producing a streamline limb with all the nuance of lifelike gesture. It was important that the piece not only work, but give the wearer that appropriate super hero-like feeling while wearing it. He achieves this with all the bells and whistles hidden within the negative space of the forearm, which give the wearer an armory of tricks up their sleeve. Concealed in the plating, [Starace] uses an Arduino and accelerometer to animate different sets of LEDs as triggered by the hand’s position coupled with specific voice commands. Depending on what angle the wrist is bent at, the fingers will either curl into a fist and reveal hidden ‘lasers’ on the back of the hand, or spread open around a pulsing circle of light on the palm when thrust outward.

The project took [Starace] quite a bit of time to print all the individual parts; around two days worth of time. This however is still considered quick in comparison to the custom outfitting and production of traditional prosthetics… not to mention, the traditional stuff wouldn’t have LEDs. This piece has a noble cause, and is an exciting example of how 3D printing is adding a level of heroism to everyday life.

Thank you Julius for pointing out this awesome project to us!

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Introducing The F*Watch, A Fully Open Electronic Watch

October 17, 2014 by Mathieu Stephan 24 Comments

As one of their colleagues was retiring, several CERN engineers got together after hours during 4 months to develop his gift: a fully open electronic watch. It is called the F*Watch and is packed with sensors: GPS, barometer, compass, accelerometer and light sensor. The microcontroller used is a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M3 SiLabs Giant Gecko which contains 128KB of RAM and 1MB of Flash. In the above picture you’ll notice a 1.28″ 128×128 pixels Sharp Memory LCD but the main board also contains a micro-USB connector for battery charging and connectivity, a micro-SD card slot, a buzzer and a vibration motor.

The watch is powered by a 500mA LiPo battery. All the tools that were used to build it are open source (FreeCAD, KiCad, GCC, openOCD, GDB) and our readers may make one by downloading all the source files located in their repository. After the break is embedded a video showing their adventure.

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