Happy Halloween! I’m in the mood for an extra, and I’ve got some stuff that’s been turning to zombies from the tipline.
Pictured above is a nice simple LED pumpkin sent in by [John]- perfect for the hacker with less than stellar art skills.
Let’s not forget [mastershake]s Hack-A-Day pumpkin from last year. Where’s the THAD pumpkin you promised? [Wolfgang] sent in these mini pumpkin bots – they look like toys, but they’re made from XBox parts and radio control cars.
Last year Max sent in his talking Halloween basket. (I always wanted to strap that voice module to a co-workers chair…)
[Brandon] built a budget (~$150) guitar hero controller out of a Gibson Epoch guitar from target.
This scanner cam has been around for a while, but I admire how he keeps fine tuning and tweaking the design. Thanks to [Loopymind] for passing it along.
I keep getting emails telling me that Google Earth has a flight simulator. Yes. We all know about it.
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Fiber Optic Flash Ring
Ring lights that surround the lens are generally used for macro photography – they’re not cheap, but they’re one of the few ways to get shadowless photos. This fiber optic flash diffuser is based on the same ideas of this one. Rather than use a few large optic strands, [Joris] is using many, many more to decrease shadows as much as possible. His previous efforts are even more interesting. He built a LED version – with serial connected LEDs and a step up switching power supply to drive them. Then he moved on to cold cathode fluorescent before moving onto the fiber optics.
Fnordlicht: RGB Mixing LED Light
While [Will] goes and hides in his offshore datashelter, Hack-A-Day is happy to welcome back our veteran foreign correspondent [fbz]. She promises future posts will have far less ‘German by example’. -[Eliot]
The Fnordlicht is a color mixing LED platform with free hardware schematics and open source firmware initially started by [fd0]. The system is dynamically controllable (via RS-485) and can also work as a standalone with pre-loaded color mixing. I have one of these soldered up and working at home; the circuits come in a stack of three boards with an optional serial level shifter board add-on. There are project pages in German about the Fnordlicht as well, which include some photos of the first prototype. Full kits (“Fnordlicht Bausatz” means “Fnordlicht kit”) and printed circuit boards (“Fnordlicht Platinensatz ohne Bauteile” means “Fnordlicht circuit board set without parts”) can be purchased from their shop, but be sure to ask them first about shipping prices to your location. I love this project, I fire it up and stick it in a corner of my hack room to add some color-changing atmosphere.
A while ago [Eliot] covered the MoMolight, a color changing led project controlled by the colors playing on your monitor.
Thinkpad Style Keyboard Light
[Sprite_tm] keeps coming up with nice work. This time he sent in his thinkpad style keyboard LED lighting solution for his toughbook. I know, you’re thinking… ‘it’s a LED…’ He used an ATtiny13 to monitor the caps lock LED. If it’s operated two times in succession, the LED is turned on and off. Nice, clean and effective.
[By the way, Part 2 of my diy projector how-to is up on engadget. Look for part 3 later Tuesday.]
Disco Bar Completed
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkqoPkuJaMI]
David Worden let us know that he has completed work on his Disco Bar which we covered earlier. To save his bandwidth, I suggest you watch the video on YouTube.
