Small CNC Gadget Draws What It Hears

September 12, 2010 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

This art piece makes drawings based on sound. [Mario Marchese], who is responsible for those illusion props back in february, built this little guy out of a bunch of junk he had lying around. It features four microphones that listen to ambient sound and feed the signal through some LM386 audio power amplifiers. The output is translated into forward, backward, left, and right movements of the writing platform while the pen is fixed in the same position. Despite what we said in the title of the post this isn’t strictly a CNC machine, but more the primordial cousin of one.

Hackaday Links: August 29, 2010

August 29, 2010 by Mike Szczys 36 Comments

Hotel room door lock picking

Here’s further proof that you should never leave anything of value in your hotel room. We’re not worried about someone getting in while the room is occupied. But these methods of defeating the chain lock and opening the door without a keycard (YouTube login required) do show how easy it is for the bad guys to steal your stuff.

iPhone frequency generator

Need one more way to make that iPhone a useful lab tool? Why not use it as a frequency generator. Start with a free app and mix in an audio cable with test leads and you’re in business.

Drag Soldering

[Andrei] sent us a link to a video about drag soldering. This is a method of soldering fine-pitch chips using a small bit of solder and a fat solder tip. The link he sent is dead now but we found another great example of the process. We were just using this method earlier in the week to solder a TSSOP38 package for an upcoming project and it worked like a charm.

Laser etched PCB

Here’s some art in PCB form thanks to a laser. We thought this might be interesting to share after seeing those art pieces made from old circuit boards. This example is laser etched, but not directly. As you probably guessed, the copper clad board is coated with resist and the laser etches some of it away. Whatever got zapped by the laser dissolves when the board is placed in acid, leaving [Riley Porter’s] art behind.

Art Piece From Board Artwork

August 29, 2010 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

[Theo Kamecke] is an artist who produces striking pieces using printed circuit boards. We’ve seen PCBs used as faux stained-glass before, but [Theo’s] craftsmanship stands apart from everything we’ve seen. His webpage has at least one piece that sites the usage of vintage 1960’s circuit boards, but we wonder if he doesn’t design some of these to suit his work. Either way, we’d love to see him take on the finish work for that mechanized expanding round table we saw back in June. See more of his work on his photostream.

[Photo Credit]

[Thanks Mowcius]

Hoverboard Comes To Life

May 29, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 57 Comments

[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/11968215]

This installation by artist [Nils Goudagnin] is a recreation of the hoverboard from Back to the Future II. We would like to see inside that plinth. We’ve seen levitating magnets before, but this is particularly stable. He says he is using lasers and a control system of some kind to stabilize it. Just to guess, we’d say that the lasers determine the distance of the board and an array of electromagnets below is adjusted to keep it level. Then again, we might be over thinking this. Even though it can’t be ridden, we’d love to have one around the office just to look at.

What’s The Worst Way To Transmit Video?

December 4, 2009 by Mike Szczys 57 Comments

Perhaps the worst possible way to transmit video would be to send all pixel data in parallel. That’s exactly how [Gebhard Sengmüller’s] parallel image device works. To be fair, this is an art piece called “A Parallel Image” that addresses the concept of where we would be if serial data transmission had never come to fruition. The brochure (PDF) accompanying the exhibit gives the juicy details we’re always looking for.

The device consists of a photo sensor unit and a display unit. Both are one-square-meter stripboard panels made of epoxy. The sensor unit consists of a 50×50 grid of photo-conductors that have their counterparts in the 50×50 grid of light bulbs on the display unit. Things start to get pretty crazy when you throw in the 7500 meters of magnet wire that connect the 2500 pixel sensor unit to the display unit.

You should be able to put together how this works. The sensors pick up light and then effect the brightness of the corresponding light bulbs. The result is an interesting image, and a nightmare of wire porn that would drive any TV repairman to drink.

Continue reading “What’s The Worst Way To Transmit Video?” →

Industrial Robots Producing Art

October 21, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 26 Comments

[blip.tv ?posts_id=2728039&dest=-1]

Here is an interesting project that should spark some good discussion. Artaic is a company that is using industrial robots to produce mosaics. They are then selling these mosaics as fine art. As you can see, some of the examples are quite nice looking. However, we have to wonder what the draw is to own one that is made by a robot. Is it really that much different from just printing an image? We really do think it is a cool project and an efficient way of producing these mosaics. We would really love to see one of those super fast delta robots doing the work.

We’re trying to reduce the negativity here at Hackaday. We are passionate geeks and hackers, and as such, we tend to jump straight to the negative points. We hope you guys will follow along with us and try to be constructive in the comments. That being said, the video did seem a bit pretentious, didn’t it?

[via BotJunkie]