Hackaday’s Portal Gun Actually Levitates A Companion Cube

October 11, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 57 Comments

I was out to lunch with a couple friends, brainstorming ideas for fun projects when one of them says “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could build a working gravity gun?”. We all immediately concurred that while it would in fact be cool, it is also a silly proposition. However, only a few seconds later, I realized we could do a display piece that emulated this concept very easily. Floating magnetic globes have been around for quite some time.

I determined I would tear the guts out of a stock floating globe and mount it on a portal gun, since they’re easier to find than a gravity gun. I would also build a custom companion cube to be the correct size and weight necessary.

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Hackaday Links: June 17, 2012

June 17, 2012 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

Portal gag-video

These guys make your own video editing chops look just plain sad. They put together a video demonstrating the portal gun in real life.

Unleashing the beast

We have this problem all the time. The noise regulations were preventing [Massimiliano Rivetti] from letting the true voice of his Ferrari be heard. He hacked into the control system and can now adjust it via iPhone to roar with power. [Thanks Claudio via openPicus]

Music so bad you want to throw something

Here’s a novel way to include the worker bees in music selection around the office. A piezo element was attached to the back of a framed poster and when you throw something at it, the next track is played. We really loved the demo video for this one. [Thanks Calum via DontBelieveTheHype]

Acrylic frame for a CNC machine

[Jake] wrote in to show off his progress on a CNC build. He’s got a frame made of acrylic and some other materials. It’s not up and running yet, but what he’s got so far looks very nice.

Helo built for one

All we can think with this one-man helicopter is failure of those propellers. At least with an ultralight plane you can glide to a gentler crash-landing. [Thanks Filespace]

Making Real-life Portals With A Kinect

May 19, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 10 Comments

[radicade] wanted to know what real life portals would look like; not something out of a game, but actual blue and orange portals on his living room wall. Short of building a portal gun, the only option available to [radicade] was simulating a pair of portals with a Kinect and a projector.

One of the more interesting properties of portals is the ability to see through to the other side – you can look through the blue portal and see the world from the orange portal’s vantage point. [radicade] simulated the perspective of a portal using the head-tracking capabilities of a Kinect.

The Kinect grabs the depth map of a room, and calculates what peering through a portal would look like. This virtual scene is projected onto a wall behind the Kinect, creating the illusion of real-life orange and blue portals.

We’ve seen this kind of pseudo-3D, head tracking display before (1, 2), so it’s no surprise the 3D illusion of portals would carry over to a projected 3D display. You can check out [radicade]’s portal demo video after the break.

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Playing The Song “Still Alive” On Hacked Exercise Equipment

May 5, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 7 Comments

Back in 2009, [Evi1wombat] pulled of this interesting hack, and it has slowly made its way through the internet to find us today. He obtained the computer from a recently deceased treadmill and decided to hack into it. Finding himself unable to flash the existing chip, he yanked it out and replaced it with something he was more familiar with, a dsPIC30F4011. Unfortunately we don’t have any pics of the inside, but he says that he had some fun with wire because the pin mapping wasn’t exactly the same. [Evi1wombat] also gained some respect for the original designer judging by this quote from the source code:

* Damn, the dude who designed that board pulled
* some pretty nifty tricks… took a while to
* get all the drivers working.

Of course, once you have control over some nifty new hardware, the first logical thing to do on it is play “Still Alive” from the game Portal.

Enjoy the video after the break.
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Portal Radio Is Why Valve Needs To Build Hardware

April 16, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 19 Comments

We’ve seen Portal gun builds, a few cute turret replicas, and even a miniaturized version of GLaDOS, but [John]‘s Portal radio replica is the first physical version of this oft-forgotten Portal item.

Interestingly, the entire radio is made from scrap. The spheroid body shell is made from the foam insulation from a commercial freezer, carefully sculpted, Bondoed, and painted over the course of 300 hours. The radio guts are taken from an upcycled radio, and powered by either an internal battery or a wall wart DC adapter – perfect for carrying around a test chamber with a portal gun.

Right now, there’s an AM/FM receiver inside the radio along with an audio input so an iPod or such can be plugged in. While we would have loved to see a loop of theuptempo version Still Alive, we’re guessing [John] hasn’t found an easy way to do that with junked parts yet.

Check out [John]‘s build video after the break.

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Hackaday Links: April 7, 2012

April 7, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

Need some gears? Got a timing belt?

[filespace] sent in a neat build he stumbled upon: making gears with plywood and a timing belt. Just cut out a plywood disk and glue on a section of timing belt. There’s some math involved in getting all the teeth evenly placed around the perimeter, but nothing too bad. Also useful for wheels, we think.

We’re on a chess kick now.

Huge chess sets are cool, right up until you try to figure out where to store the pieces when they’re not being used. [Jayefuu] came up with a neat solution to this problem. His pieces are cut out of coroplast (that corrugated plastic stuff political campaign signs are made of), making it relatively inexpensive and just as fun as normal giant chess pieces on a tile floor.

<INSERT MARGINALLY RELEVANT PORTAL QUOTE HERE>

[Randy]’s son is in the cub scouts. Being the awesome father he is, [Randy] helped out with this year’s pinewood derby build. It’s a car shaped like a portal gun with the obligatory color-changing LED. The car won the ‘Can’t get more awesome’ award, but wheel misalignment kicked it out of the competition during qualifying rounds. Sad, that. Still awesome, though.

These people are giving you tools for free

Caltech professor [Yaser Abu-Mostafa] is teaching a Machine Learning class this semester. You can take this class as well, even if the second lecture started last Thursday.

Turning an Arduino into a speech synthesizer

[AlanFromJapan] sent in this product page for an Arduino-powered speech synthesizer. We’re probably looking at a relabeled ATmega328 with custom firmware here; to use it, you replace the micro in your Arduino Uno with this chip. The chip goes for about $10 USD here, so we’ll give it a week until someone has this proprietary firmware up on the Internet. There are English morphemes that aren’t in Japanese, so you can’t just ‘type in English’ and have it work. Here’s a video.

Six things in this links post. We’re feeling generous.

What would you build if you had a laser cutter? [Doug Miller] made a real, working fishing reel. No build log or files, but here’s a nice picture.

Portal Mini Golf Hole Will Incinerate Your Ball…you Monster

March 12, 2012 by Mike Nathan 38 Comments

portal-golf-hole

One of [Tom’s] friends is celebrating a birthday soon, and he was asked to make a mini golf hole for the event. While most people would expect to bring beer or guac to the shindig, he saw this as an opportunity to bring a little bit of Portal to life.

Near the end of the first Portal game, you are forced to pitch your companion cube into the incinerator, a scene which [Tom] thought would be the perfect mini golf hole. He started out by building an iris door mechanism, which he surrounded with chicken wire and some plaster, producing a fantastic-looking waste disposal pipe.

He added a ramp that leads up to the hole, then [Tom] got busy with the electronics portion of the fixture. Once the portal button at the end of the ramp is pressed, an Arduno triggers a pair of motors to open the waste disposal door and fire up a smoke machine. The result, as you can see in the video below, is nothing short of awesome.

[Tom] says he’s in the process of building a pair of turrets and a working golf ball portal as well, so if you’re a big Portal fan, be sure to check out his site for updates.

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