LED Sound Board Is Not Your Father

February 26, 2015 by James Hobson 10 Comments

Who doesn’t like Star Wars, LEDs, and music? [Stathack] was looking for a unique piece of art to put in his living room… so he decided to make his own Vader EQ.

The EQ is a massive 4′ x 5′ piece made from plywood and MDF. [Stathack] traced the familiar helmet onto it by using a projector to project the outline onto the surface. Not having access to an extra large CNC or laser, he then painstakingly used a jigsaw to cut out all the white pieces of the design — holy cow.

This process only took weeks and weeks of sanding, filling and sanding again due to the excellent precision of a jigsaw.

Once that was all done, he created the backing plate out of MDF to provide structural support and mounting locations for the LEDs. Bit of spray paint later and a simple circuit with the Arduino and it’s both done, and awesome.

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Dead Simple Hologram Effect

February 8, 2015 by Rick Osgood 32 Comments

We’ve all seen holograms in movies, and occasionally we see various versions of the effect in real life. The idea of having a fully three-dimensional image projected magically into space is appealing, but we haven’t quite mastered it yet. [Steven] hasn’t let that stop him, though. He’s built himself a very simple device to display a sort of hologram.

His display relies on reflections. The core of the unit is a normal flat screen LCD monitor laid on its back. The other component looks like a four-sided pyramid with the top cut off. The pyramid is made from clear plastic transparency sheets, held together with scotch tape. It’s placed on top of the LCD with the narrow end facing down.

[Steven] then used the open source Blender program to design a few 3D animations. Examples include a pterodactyl flying and an approximation of the classic Princess Leia hologram from Star Wars Episode 4. The LCD screen displays the animation from four different angles at once. The images are displayed up and onto the transparency sheet, which then get reflected to your eyes. The result is an image that looks almost as if it’s floating in space if viewed from the proper angle. If you move around the screen you can see the image from all four sides, which helps to sell the effect. Not bad for a few dollars worth of parts. Continue reading “Dead Simple Hologram Effect” →

Drone-enium Falcon

February 5, 2015 by Mike Szczys 23 Comments

If you own a quadcopter chances are you own more than one. It’s kind of an addictive thing in that way. So dig out that dinged up model and build something awesome around it. We’d suggest making it look exactly like a Millenium Falcon. Okay, to be fair this is built around a custom quadcopter originally designed to carry a camera and GPS but removed for this project. We’re not sure if stock models have enough extra umph to lift a fancy fuselage like this (maybe you’ll weigh in on that in the comments?).

As with any great build this started with a scale drawing. The drawing was printed for use as a cutting template for the expanded polystyrene. Part of what makes it look so fantastic is that the fuselage isn’t 2-dimensional. There is depth in the places that matter and that’s all because of near-mythical foam cutting/shaping skills on [Olivier’s] part.

Final touches are LEDs on front and to simulate the curved engine on the tail. You can almost see this thing picking up a handless [Luke] below Bespin’s floating city. This Falcon flies like… a quadcopter (what did you expect? The Kessel Run in 12 parsecs?), which you can see in the videos after the break. The second clip shows how easy it is to remove the foam body from the quad frame, yet another nice touch!

Of course if Star Wars isn’t your thing you can give trolling the skies as a flying body a shot.

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Parametric Spherical Speakers Are Not A Moon

January 1, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

A good speaker enclosure is not just about building a box out of plywood and covering it with carpet, although playing with 1F capacitors is pretty cool. No, for a good speaker enclosure you need the right internal volume, the right size bass port, the right speaker, and it should definitely, certainly, not be a moon. [Rich] figured out he could do all of this with a 3D printer, resulting in the NOMOON: The NOMOON Orbital Music-Making Opensource, Openscad-generated Nihilator.

This work is a continuation of earlier work that designed parameterized speakers in the shape of Borg cubes. Now [Rich] is on to Borg scout ships, and this version has everything you would expect for speaker design.

The NOMOON is available on the Thingiverse Customizer with variables for the internal diameter, the volume of the enclosure in liters, wall thickness, speaker hole, bass port, and wire holes. Of course a customized design is also possible with a stock OpenSCAD installation.

[Rich] has printed a few of these not moons and even with a speaker with terrible bass response, he has a pretty good-sounding setup as far as Youtube videos go. You can check that out below.

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The R2D2-‘O-Lantern Reddit Doesn’t Want You To See

October 31, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 21 Comments

The people here at Hackaday aren’t dedicating their entire lives to moderating comments and sending press releases to the circular file; some of us actually have jobs and hobbies. [James Hobson] works at a projector company that was having a pumpkin carving contest today. He came up with the best possible use of a pumpkin projector – a R2D2-‘o-lantern that plays the message from [Leia] to [Obi-Wan Kenobi]. [James] submitted this to reddit, but one of the mods deleted it. We’re much cooler than a few mods and their little empire, so we’re putting it up here.

Instead of a knife, [James] used a rather interesting method for carving a pumpkin – a laser cutter. By maxing out the Z height of his laser cutter, he was able to cut a perfect R2D2 graphic on the surface of a pumpkin. No, [James] isn’t removing any of the pumpkin’s skin after the lasering is done, but the result still looks great when backlit.

Inside the pumpkin is a projector playing the famous distress message made from the captured Tantive IV. It’s not entirely accurate – [James] put the projector behind R2’s radar eye and not the holographic projectors, and to project [Leia] in mid-air he would need something like this, Still, it’s a great project we expect to see cloned a year or so from now.

Star Wars: Yoda Stories with a modified tile set

Reverse Engineering Star Wars: Yoda Stories

October 8, 2014 by Eric Evenchick 22 Comments

Star Wars: Yoda Stories was released by LucasArts in 1997 to minimal critical acclaim. As IGN said, “like Phantom Menace proved, just because it’s Star Wars doesn’t mean it’s good.” This didn’t stop [Zach] from playing it, and years later, taking an interest in reverse engineering the game.

[Zach]’s reverse engineering of Star Wars: Yoda Stories (google cache) takes a look at the game’s data file. This binary file is parsed by the game at run time to extract sound effects, sprites, and map tiles. Perhaps the best known game data file type was Doom’s WAD file, which had purpose built editing programs from third parties.

After a quick look at the data file in HxD, [Zach] began writing scripts in C# to extract different sections of the data file. Once the sections were found, more code was used to apply a color palette and generate bitmaps.

In the end, [Zach] managed to get a couple thousand tiles of the game’s data. He found some interesting ones, such as the sports car that he replaced the X-Wing with in his mod. The engine for an earlier Lucasarts game, Indiana Jones and His Desktop Adventures, should be very similar, and once we find the Mac install disk and a copy of ResEdit, we’ll post something on Hackaday.io.

LEGO And Arduino Meet Han Solo

August 17, 2014 by Bryan Cockfield 14 Comments

This full-size replica blaster from Star Wars, most iconically used by Han Solo and Princess Leia, has everything. Flashing LEDs, blaster noises, LEGO, and yes, even an Arduino. Not bad for [Baron von Brunk]’s first project to use an Arduino!

The blaster was based on electronics and LEGO that were lying around and was intended for use for Star Wars Day 2014. (May the Fourth be with you.) “Lying around” in this sense might be a bit of an understatement for [Baron von Brunk], as the design of the blaster required the use of the LEGO Digital Designer and 400 blocks, some of which are quite rare.

The electronics for the project are tied to a moving trigger mechanism (also made from LEGO). The trigger mechanism hits a momentary pushbutton which tells the Arduino to activate the LEDs and a separate 555 timer and sound recording/playback device which handles the classic blaster sounds. The whole thing is powered by a 9V battery and housed in the front of the blaster, and all of the code (and the LEGO schematics) are available on the project’s site.

This is quite an impressive replica, and the craftsmanship that went into the build shows, especially in the LEGO parts. We think Han Solo would indeed be proud! If you’re ready to go even further with Star Wars and LEGO, you might want to check out this barrel organ that plays the Star Wars theme.