[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGRBjCrnjhs]
Here’s another hacked Nerf Vulcan rifle. This time it is an automated sentry gun. You must present it your badge, if no badge is found, you are assaulted with a fiery storm of small nerf darts. All encounters are logged and a photos are kept. This was a final project at Cornell, and for once it wasn’t ECE. This was for CS1114. They did a pretty good job with the tracking, now they need to add some more interesting voice options to it.
[Matthew] sent us his group’s final project, where they built a nice GPS logging system. Not only can it simply log the GPS coordinates on a predetermined interval, it can also be triggered to make an entry by a wireless device. In this example, they use a camera. This allows them to then upload all the GPS information and pictures to places like Google Earth.
They are using an ATmega644, with an LCD, SD card, and GPS unit. They had to do a little hacking on their camera to add the wireless transmitter, which triggers the logger. You can see not only the cost break down and source code for the project, but also a map with lots of geotagged photos. This is the kind of thing we can almost see as a standard item in the future.
When we ran the story about the office chair that twittered your flatulent activity, many people commented on the fact that it had no method of determining intensity. Well, here’s the solution to that problem(is this really a problem?). These students built a fart intensity detector for their final project in ece 476. It measures the sound and temperature, as well as the composition of each fart. They really added some bells and whistles on this project. Not only will it display your statistics on and LCD screen after a reading, it will beep and, if your fart was intense enough, blow it away with a little fan. You even have the option of playing back the audio recording of your most recent glory.
[Jonathan] sent us his final project for ECE 476. His group built an LED POV display that can be updated wirelessly from a computer. They built it in a somewhat modular fashion, with the LED strip being a simple to replace module. This goes along with their plan to build a 3D version of the display. They have made it able to switch easily from it’s internal programming to direct computer control, allowing them to leave it alone in clock mode, or take control to play with it. The updates seem really quick, you can see them in effect in the video after the break. All source code and schematics are available on the site. We love these final projects, they usually have tons of data and great pictures. Keep them coming.
For their final project in ECE 4760 at Cornell, [Christina] and [Joe] made a small single octave keyboard using LEDs as the input. They used a total of 63 LEDs to make the keys. Each key consists of 9 LEDs, with the center one acting as a sensor. When you lay your finger on it, the light reflects off of your finger and is picked up by the center LED. An ATMega 664 runs custom code to play a sound. You can find out more details about the construction as well as download the source code on the site. You can also download an example movie of it in action ( 7MB .mp4)
