Key-covered Textiles

July 24, 2012 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

[Karolina] has been hard at work adding a little flair to her bag. Well, a lot of flair actually. She rolled several keyboards worth of keys into one of the panels for this bag. She had seen the idea in a magazine and decided to give it a try. The secret is to use staples.

The first issues is gather enough keys, so if you give this a try make sure to let your friends know you’re looking for old keyboards. Next she wanted each of the keys to lay flat on the fabric panel, which meant cutting away the plastic pegs that extend past the edges of the key. From there [Karolina] laid out her design with each key face down. Notice how careful she was to make sure there were no gaps between them. Now it was time to link them all together. She used heavy-duty staples as connecting brackets. They were bent to provide a large gluing surface on the underside of the face of each key. With the staples in place, each can be sewn to the fabric with a loop of thread. Although she started the project in the fall she’s just now showing off the finished bag.

Using A Watch To Control Ms. Pacman

July 20, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 4 Comments

Recently, [Alan] broke out the ‘ol Atari 2600 to relive his childhood with a bit of Yar’s Revenge and Adventure, but after looking at his new TI EZ430 Chronos watch, he figured he could add a bit of motion control from this classic game system. He used the accelerometer in this watch to play Ms. Pacman by tilting his wrist, an awesome build that really shows off the power of his new wrist worn device.

The watch is running stock firmware and communicates to a PC via an RF module attached to his computer’s USB port. The accelerometer data is fed into a VB.net app to convert the movements of the wrist into up, down, left, and right commands. These commands are then sent out over a serial port to an Arduino to translate those commands into something the Atari joystick port can understand.

Sure, it may be a roundabout way of playing Ms. Pacman, but considering the TI Chronos has been used for very serious work such as stopping SIDS and helping out soccer referees, we’re happy to see a more frivolous application for this neat watch.

You can check out [Alan]’s video after the break, or get the VB and Arduino source here and here.

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Store Your RFID Transit Card Inside Your Cellphone

July 17, 2012 by Mike Szczys 54 Comments

Check it out, this is a Boston transit pass — or at least the parts of it that matters. [Becky Stern] got rid of the rest in a bid to embed the RFID tag inside her cellphone.

The transit pass, called a CharlieCard, started out as a normal credit card shaped tag which you might use for access in the workplace. She unsheathed the chip and its antennae by giving it a generous soak in acetone. In about thirty minutes the plastic card looks more like paper pulp, and you can gently fish out the electronics. These are now small enough to fit in the back cover of a cellphone much like those inductive charging hacks.

[Becky] put hers in an iPhone. But the idea comes from [Dhani Sutanto] who used the same technique to extract the coil from a London transit pass. He then embedded the hardware in a resin cast ring.

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GPS Dog Collar Keeps Track Of Your Walks

July 13, 2012 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

[Becky Stern] came up with a way to make sure you and your dog are getting enough exercise. It’s a dog collar mounted GPS that measures how far you have walked. Just set your target distance and the progress bar in the middle of this flower will let you know when you reached it.

The most obvious piece of hardware is the OLED board which is sticking out like a sore thumb. But if you’d like to be a little more discreet you could forego the full-featured display for some carefully places LEDs to make up a circular progress bar. The GPS module itself fits well in the center of the flower, which [Becky] shows us how to make out of wire-edged ribbon. Hidden on the other side is an ATmega23u4 breakout board running the Arduino bootloader.

If you’re interested in sewables and textiles [Becky] uses a lot of basic techniques that are good to learn. Check it out in the clip after the break. She’s always shown a remarkable ability to develop projects which won’t scare away the villagers in the way our wire-sprouting breadboard hacks sometimes do.

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Fifa Looks At Electronic Augmentation

July 4, 2012 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

The [Fédération Internationale de Football Association] is joining the growing list of professional sports that is adopting technological means in an attempt to help the human referees. After a botched call in 2010 the organization called for a system that would work day or night, with 100% accuracy and the ability to report to the Refs in less than 1 second. The applicants have been weeded out and it comes down to two systems, both of which use a piece of personal hardware we’re quite familiar with. [Fe80], who sent in the tip, recognized the TI Chronos eZ430 watch in the image above.

The two systems both use the watch as an interface, but work very differently. The first, called GoalRef, uses a sensor suspended inside the ball. This detects a magnetic field made up by the goal posts. We’d guess it’s an inductance sensor that is triggered when it passes a coil in the goal posts (we didn’t find much in the way of technical info so please do your own speculation in the comments). The second system is very familiar. It’s the Hawkeye camera system used by the APT (Tennis) in all the major tournaments.

Ankle Bracelet Lets You Become Emperor Palpatine

June 27, 2012 by Mike Szczys 57 Comments

Want to shoot lighting bolts from your hands to punish your enemies? You can (almost) do just that with this static electricity generator hack. Above you can see the charge jumping off of this guy’s knuckle and surging through the LED. But that’s not the only trick you can pull off when wearing just a bit of hardware around your ankle. The video after the break shows sand grains jumping around as a charged hand is waved over them.

The trick is done by powering a negative ion generator from a 9V battery. This can’t be done directly, since the ion generator is looking for an AC power source. But conversion is as easy as scrapping an inverter which is designed to plug into a car cigarette lighter. Everything is shoehorned into a glasses case, which can then be strapped on to your ankle. Why this fascination with the ankle area? One part of the answer is that this provides an easy way to interface the ion generator output with your skin. The other part of the answer is that you need to make sure the system is grounded (but you’re not) and the build includes a ring that goes around your shoe to achieve this.

Check out the demo and full build instructions in the video after the break.

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Blinky Headgear

June 25, 2012 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

This hat has a chasing LED feature thanks to our old friend the 555 timer. [BananaSlug] even built in the option to change the speed at the push of a button.

His design starts out with a costume hat. Each of the 25 LEDs is soldered to a 2×4 hole chunk of protoboard. The LED package is pushed through a slit in the hat, but the protoboard remains on the inside where it can be sewn in place. From there [BananaSlug] soldered one negative bus around the circumference, and an individual positive lead from each module back to the control board. They’re addressed by a set of CD4017 decade counters which are clocked by the 555 timer circuit.

This is a great little analog/logic project and the style is perfect if you’ve got the coat to go along with it.