Disco Drumming With Piezo Sensitive Lighting

October 1, 2010 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

[Wilfred’s] brother outfitted a snare drum with LEDs for Dutch Carnival. They faded through different colors randomly and were a nice addition to the normal looking instrument, but [Wilfred] suggested that the LEDs change color with each drum stroke. He set out to design a controller circuit to provide the functionality and ended with a small package based around an ATtiny2313 microcontroller. A piezo buzzer is used to detect the vibrations inside the drum, each hit triggering a different color combination. The LEDs fade to off after each impact as if dying along with the sound, and when not struck for 30 seconds the system defaults to a red heartbeat pattern. See for yourself after the break.

We’d love to see this feature added to each drum in one of those robotic drumsets. Continue reading “Disco Drumming With Piezo Sensitive Lighting” →

Gutting An Air Freshener For The Parts

September 24, 2010 by Mike Szczys 40 Comments

[Doug Paradis] took a good look inside the Air Wick Freshmatic Compact i-Motion and then stole all the parts for other projects. We’ve looked at adding a manual spray button or making air fresheners Internet enabled before. Those models didn’t have parts that were all that interesting, but this one has a passive infrared motion sensor. You’ll also gain three switches, a PNP transistor, and an LED.

Price seems to be all over the map for this model, but [Doug] says you can find it for $8 or less. After showing how to make a tool to bypass the triangular security screws, he explains how to access the PIR sensor. But if you want to be all you can be with the hardware, he details the modifications needed to patch into the analog and digital circuitry on the rest of the board too.

Input Device Using LED And Four Photoresistors

September 22, 2010 by Mike Szczys 38 Comments

[Julien] built an input device that uses reflected light detected by some photoresistors. Placing your hand above the device will reflect light from the LED back down onto the cadmium-sulfide sensors. The resistance of those sensors is read by four ADC pins on a Teensy microcontroller and translated to mouse movements. In the video after the break you can see that this works rather well in controlling the cursor. The source code is available on pastebin but we’re also going to host the code for posterity.

Continue reading “Input Device Using LED And Four Photoresistors” →

Matrix Clock Is A Breadboarding Win

September 22, 2010 by Mike Szczys 23 Comments

Normally when we feature a clock made with a 32×8 LED matrix we’d load up an image of the display for the banner photo. But this time around we were so impressed by [JB’s] breadboard work we had to use this image. We see an ATmega168, three buttons, three LEDs, a piezo buzzer, 32.768 kHz crystal, smoothing capacitor, and a few resistors; everything he needed to keep time and display it on the matrix module. If this is just going to sit on your bookshelf for a while it’s a great alternative to point-to-point soldering on a protoboard. Nice work fitting it all on there [JB].

Daft Punk Table With IPod Dock

September 18, 2010 by Mike Szczys 35 Comments

This beautifully crafted Daft Punk table with iPod dock was built by [Dustin Evans]. The table itself was built with the help of a friend in one day with electronics added a bit later. It features an 8×8 grid of boxes with red LEDs mounted inside. The picture above is not quite the finished product, a diffuser will be added later to augment the scattering of light already provided by cutting the tip off of each LED. On the underside you’ll find a power supply and a set of speakers. The system is controlled by an Arduino which resides in the same drawer as the dock. See the final product in the clip after the break.

Continue reading “Daft Punk Table With IPod Dock” →

Analog Style LED Clock

September 13, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 17 Comments

We spied this pretty LED clock this morning and were impressed with how cleanly it was constructed. It was built to mimic an analog clock, so you have the typical hour markings and a minute and hour hand. The minute hand stays in each position for roughly 2 to 3 minutes. The brains behind all those LEDs are a PIC 16f877 with a DS1307 realtime clock. Over all, [WellyBoot] soldered 169 LEDs into place, and did it in a nice clean fashion. We suspect that if we had done it, it would resemble a spaghetti pile. You can see the schematics and build pictures on his site, or watch a video of it in action after the break.

[via HackedGadgets]

Continue reading “Analog Style LED Clock” →

Barcode Infiltrator

September 2, 2010 by James Munns 25 Comments

Whenever someone manages to expose vulnerabilities in everyday devices, we love to root for them. [Adrian] over at Irongeek has been inspired to exploit barcodes as a means to attack a POS database. Based on an idea from a Pauldotcom episode, he set out to make a rapid attack device, using an LED to spoof the signals that would be received by scanning a barcode. By exposing the POS to a set of generic database attacks, including XSS, SQL Injection, and other errors easily solved by input sanitation, he has created the first version of an automated system penetration device. In this case the hardware is simple, but the concept is impressive.

With the hardware explained and the source code provided, as well as a basic un-sanitized input cheat sheet, the would-be barcode hackers have a great place to start if they feel compelled to provide a revision two.

[Thanks Robert W.]