Transformer Built From MIT Admissions Mailing Tube

June 24, 2013 by Mike Szczys 21 Comments

mit-admissions-tube-robot It’s not quite on the scale of [Michael Bay], but that’s probably a good thing. We do think that this robot built from a mailing tube by [Will Jack] would be right at home in a Transformers movie.

The bot starts out looking like a normal cardboard mailing tube. But the seam at the middle splits to reveal the electronics inside. An Arduino Uno drives the device, monitoring that infrared rangefinder which is facing forward. Each half of the tube acts as a wheel, pushing against the at-rest mass of the internals to create motion. It can even pull off a tank-like pivot to turn in place by spinning he halves in opposite directions.

We were intrigued to hear that the admissions department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sent a single page acceptance letter in these silver tubes to those students accepted into the class of 2017. The letter invites the incoming class to hack the tube and send in their results. We’re going to have to dig through the submissions and see if there are any other noteworthy projects.

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Sony SmartWatch Running Arduino Sketches

June 22, 2013 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

sony-smartwatch-arduino-sketches

Well that didn’t take long. We just heard last week about the Sony inviting firmware hacks for their SmartWatch and here’s an early example. This image above is an animation running on the watch. It was written as an Arduino sketch which runs on a custom firmware image. [Veqtor] wrote the sketch, which is just a couple of nested loops drawing lines and circles. The real hack is in the firmware itself.

[Veqtor] took part in a workshop (translated) put on by [David Cuartielles] which invited attendees to try their Arduino coding skills on his firmware hack for the watch. It implements an Android parser, but the development is in very early stages. Right now there’s zero information in his readme file. But the root directory of the repo has a huge todo list. Dig through it and see if you can fork his code to help lend a hand.

Learn more about the SmartWatch firmware from the original announcement.

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A Charming Arduino King Cobra Game

June 22, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 22 Comments

cobra

Here’s a fun game from [A.J.]’s lab. It’s a simulated king cobra made from an Arduino, an ultrasonic sensor, and a servo. The aim of the game is to grab a ball in front of the device without being ‘bitten’ by the thumbtack attached to a drinking straw controlled by a servo. You know, just like a real king cobra.

There’s no schematic or build plans for this project, but it looks easy enough to cobble together. Despite its simplicity, this game looks hilariously fun, and could quite possibly provide more entertainment through using the machine rather than simply building it.

No text description of this game can do it justice, so check out the video below. It looks like a lot of fun, and if you already have the parts in a bin somewhere, it’ll make a great weekend build.

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Outputting Text On A Paper Tape Machine

June 22, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 24 Comments

thegame

Back before the days of 8 inch floppy disks, storing computer programs was much more primitive than even a stack of punch cards. The earliest general purpose computers used paper tape, a strip of paper with punched holes designating a 0 or a 1. Thankfully for the computer scientists of the day, these paper tapes weren’t created by hand. No, the Friden SP-2 tape punch took care of the duties of punching holes in these tapes. When [Max] rescued one of these tape punch machines from a trash bin, he knew what he needed to do: connect it to an Arduino so he could create his own paper tapes.

[Max] found a veroboard with a bunch of transistors inside the machine that was added by a previous owner. After finding the manual for the machine he connected it to an Arduino, holding each of the eight control pins high to punch the tape, and then holding another pin high to advance the tape. With this, he was able to punch letters instead of binary code into his paper tape.

[Max] also added an Ethernet shield to his Arduino that checks his email. If an email shows up in a special folder, it outputs the subject line to the tape punch machine, giving him an entirely retro ticker tape machine, built with vintage 60s hardware.

There are a pair of videos of [Max]’s tape punch machine in action below, along with a gallery of the glamorous gut shots of this incredible machine.

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An Arduino Power Inverter

June 21, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 32 Comments

If you’ve got a few solar panels lying around, or even if you want some 120/230 V AC power from a few 12 Volt batteries, you’ll need a power inverter. Sure, you can drop on down to any big box store and pick one of these up, or you can be like [Michael] and build your own (Danish, translation).

[Michael] found himself in the possession of a few halogen light transformers and decided to make use of them by building a DC to AC power inverter. The inverter is fairly simple – just the transformer, a few MOSFETS, and an ATMega0168 for software control that includes a ‘soft start’ feature that prevents power surges on startup.

The circuit is simple enough to etch at home, although a soldermask and a nice insulated enclosure would probably be ideal for this application.

Giving An RC Tank A Fire Control Computer

June 11, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 29 Comments

tank

[Vincent] plays around with remote control tanks, and even though his current model is a WWII-era armor piece, he’d still like modern accoutrements such as a fire control computer and laser sighting for his main gun. His latest project did just that (French, Google translation) with the help of an Arduino, a few modifications to the receiver, and an IR rangefinder.

The stock RC tank includes servos to move the turret and the requisite electronics to fire an Airsoft gun. The precision of the mechanical movements inside the turret weren’t very precise, though, so [Vincent] had to gear down the servos to turn large movements into slight adjustments. After that, he installed an IR rangefinder and laser diode onto the barrel that allowed the gun to sight a target and read its distance.

After some experimentation with the rangefinder and laser, [Vincent] plotted data from firing a few BBs at a whole bunch of distances and targets. The graph came out fairly linear, and after plugging this into a graphing calculator, he was able to find an equation that took into account the distance and angle so the Arduino-powered fire control computer would hit its mark.

The accuracy of the gun is very impressive, all things considered. [Vincent] is able to accurately fire BBs downrange and hit an 8×12 cm target at five meters. You can check out that action below.

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Apple MagSafe Protocol Hacking

June 7, 2013 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

[Ken Shirriff] was interested in how the Apple MagSafe works. Specifically he wanted to know what controlled the LED on the connector itself so he tore one open to see what is inside. There’s a chip present and he didn’t waste time figuring out how the MagSafe communication protocol works.

The DS2413 chip he found on the MagSafe’s tiny little PCB has just six pins. Two of these control a pair of LEDs, which give the indicator its color range. Another pin is used for 1-wire communications. When polled the charger will return a 64-bit identification number that includes a variety of information. [Ken] looks into what data is offered from several different models of charger by using the Arduino setup above. But the results are not entirely straight-forward as he discusses in his article. The 1-wire protocol is also used to switch the LEDs. This process is the responsibility of the computer being charged, but [Ken] shows how the colors can be cycled using an Arduino (with a couple of 9-volts as a source instead of a connection to mains).