Hackaday Links: December 7 2009

December 7, 2009 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5lksMvmqQc]

Ah the beauty of watching molten solder pull SMD components into place. Yeah, we’ve seen it before, but for some reason it never gets old.

The glory days of wardriving are certainly behind us but if you’re still hunting in certain areas for access points you can leave the laptop at home. A homebrew program called Road Dog can turn your PSP into a WiFi search device. You must be able to run custom code to use this app.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OE2pB1pyZN0]

Ferrofluid is our friend. But having grown up watching the Terminator and Hellraiser movies we can’t help being a little creeped out by the effects seen in this movie.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1OTSbIzcwI]

Follow along with the NASA astronauts in this 20 minute HD tour of the international space station. It’s a cramped place to live but we can’t help thinking that it looks incredibly clean. After all, where would the dirt come from?

How are your woodworking skills? Can you take a wooden block and turn it on a lathe until you have a lampshade 1/32″ thick? We’d love to see how these are made, but imagine the artist’s reaction when hours of labor are ruined by a minuscule amount of misplaced pressure on a carving tool. Patience, we’ll learn it some day!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6pUMlPBMQA]

This video from the past that is about the future of travel does leave us wondering why our cars don’t have built-in radar for poor visibility? We’ve already realized the rear-view-mirror-tv-picture, but we’re going to need your help before the flying police/fire/ambulance-mobile is a common sight. Oh, the fun of seeing a high-tech push-button selector 3:30 into the video. Perhaps the touch-screen was a bit beyond the vision of the time.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VW5PByaR2EQ]

Sometimes you have so many servants you need to find creative things for them to do. Only the most discriminating of the super-rich employ a person whose sole responsibility is to erase and redraw the hands of a clock each minute. This video is obviously a result of the global recession as the live time-keeper has been let go; a looping recording took his job!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7woG0pqFjs]

Last time we checked in with [Marco Tempest] he was syncing video over multiple iPhones. Now he’s at it again with an augmented reality setup. A camera picks up some IR LEDs in a canvas and translates that into information for a video projector. We’d call this a trick, but it’s certainly not magic.

Homopolar Motor

November 10, 2009 by Mike Szczys 36 Comments

homopolar-motor

Slow day at the office? Here’s a trick that’ll make your coworkers smile. Dangerously Fun has a guide to build a homopolar motor from a battery, copper wire, and magnet. A homopolor motor doesn’t rely on electromagnets in an armature changing their polarity to force a rotation movement compared to stationary magnets. Instead, they use an electrical current’s orientation to a magnetic field to provide a repulsive or rotational force. In this implementation, the current moves through a loops of copper wire from one pole of a battery to the other. A rare-earth magnet on one pole of the battery provides the magnetic field.

After the break we’ve embedded video of this simple example as well as a few more complex homopolar examples such as a five speed version. The motor in action certainly brings a smile to our faces and places this firmly in the useless machines family of hacks.

Continue reading “Homopolar Motor” →

Dirk’s Accident

February 18, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 57 Comments

fingermag

Warning: this link contains graphic images depicting removal of a fingernail by giant freaking magnets. [Dirk] likes to collect odd things. A few of those odd things, just happen to be massive Neodymium magnets. Even though he was really really careful, somehow two of them ended up close enough to attract each other. After a brief flight, the two collided with his finger tip in between them. It is probably still there now.

We know these things can be pretty dangerous and usually warn people when doing projects that require them, like building a wind turbine.

Wearable Haptic Devices Bestow Sixth Senses

June 13, 2008 by Juan Aguilar 14 Comments

Engadget recently posted a story about a flexible tactile display that can be wrapped around any part of the body and give haptic feedback to the user. The research team from Korea’s Sungkyunkwan University that developed the device are focusing on applications like Braille for the visually impaired or transmitting tactile data to a remote user, but this is just the beginning; the applications for wearable haptic feedback are wide open.