Star Wars Training Droid Uses The Force

May 2, 2014 by Adam Fabio 2 Comments

We all know the scene, Obi-Wan Kenobi gives Luke a helmet with the blast shield down. He tells Luke “Your eyes can deceive you. Don’t trust them. Stretch out with your feelings!” Easy for Obi-Wan to say – he doesn’t have a remote training droid flying around and shooting at him. [Roeland] and his team are working to create a real-life version of the training droid for Hackday’s Sci-Fi contest.

The training droid in Star Wars may not have had the Force on its side, but it was pretty darn agile in the air. To replicate this, the team started with a standard Walkera Ladybird micro quadcopter. It would have been simple to have a human controlling the drone-turned-droid, but [Roeland and co] wanted a fully computer controlled system. The Ladybird can carry a small payload, but it just doesn’t have the power to lift a computer and sensor suite. The team took a note from the GRASP Lab and used an external computer with a camera to control their droid.

Rather than the expensive motion capture system used by the big labs, the team used a pair of Wii Remote controllers for stereo vision. A small IR LED mounted atop the droid made it visible to the Wii Remotes’ cameras. A laptop was employed to calculate the current position of the droid. With the current and desired positions known, the laptop calculated and sent commands to an Arduino, which then translated them for the droid’s controller.

Nice work guys! Now you just have to add the blaster emitters to it!

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An AT-ATX: A Different Kind Of Power Supply

March 15, 2014 by James Hobson 8 Comments

[Jedii72] needed a power supply. A quick search online revealed many instructions for building one out of an old ATX power supply, but — he didn’t want just any kind of power supply — he wanted to build an AT-ATX.

He started with a vintage AT-AT toy from the 80’s, and then began cutting it into pieces. ~~Hold for gasps of disbelief.~~ Don’t worry though — it was in poor condition to start with, so it was never really considered a collectible. After cleaning over 30 years of grime and dirt off the toy, he gave it a fresh coat of jet black paint — not exactly canon, but it does look pretty awesome. You know, it would make a pretty awesome Sci-Fi contest entry, don’t you agree? Continue reading “An AT-ATX: A Different Kind Of Power Supply” →

Building Han Solo’s Blaster

July 11, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 3 Comments

It’s no secret that [Adam Savage] of Mythbusters fame is a huge fan of replica props, going so far as to make a Maltese Falcon out of Sculpey. This time, though, he’s doing one better for the nerds in the crowd by building the most accurate replica of Han Solo’s blaster ever.

Replica prop gurus already know [Lucas]’ original prop department based Han Solo’s BlasTech DL-44 blaster off an existing gun – the Mauser C96. Along with this gun, there were a few extra bits and bobs tacked onto this gun, including an old German scope, a flash hider from an aircraft machine gun, and even a few bits of metal from a model airplane.

All these extra parts and greeblies are very hard, if not impossible to find. Thankfully, there are a bunch of very skilled replica prop makers reproducing these parts for anyone who wants a very accurate DL-44 Blaster. [Norm] from Tested and [Adam] assembled these parts into an incredibly accurate replica of the ‘hero’ blaster – by far the most identifiable of Solo’s many iterations of blaster seen in Star Wars ep. IV.

R2D2 Cake Plays Leia’s Distress Message

June 19, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 15 Comments

As all 6-year-olds should, [Marc]’s son is a huge fan of Star Wars. For his birthday party, he wanted a Star Wars themed cake, and making one in the shape of R2D2 seemed to be right up [Marc]’s alley. Of course any clone of everyone’s favorite R2 unit should also display Leia’s distress message to Ben Kenobi, and [Marc] figured out a way to do just that.

Because of R2’s strange and decidedly non-cake shape, [Marc] first constructed a stand out of wood, cardboard, and a PVC pipe to hold the cake into place. The cylindrical droid body is of course made of cake and frosting, with R2’s dome made out of fondant.

The PVC pipe running up the center of the droid provided [Marc] with the ability to run a power and video connector up R2’s spine. These are connected to a small projector receiving video from a netbook placed out of the way.

You can check out a video of the R2 cake playing Leia’s holographic distress message below. At the end of the video, there’s a 6-year-old birthday party guest saying, “what is that?” It might be time to dig out the VHS player and the non-remastered trilogy, [Marc].

R2D2 Collects Valentine’s Cards Like A Boss

February 16, 2013 by Mike Szczys 14 Comments

Think back to your school days when each student would make a box which would receive Valentine’s cards from their friends. We have fond memories of buying cards with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on them. We guess this tradition is still going strong. Instead of making a receptacle out of a shoe box [Dr Franken Storer] helped his seven-year-old build this remote control R2D2 with sounds and lights. Yeah, it’s totally cheating. But who can begrudge a hacker dad a little fun?

The bot started as a desktop trash can. It features a domed top which looks just like the droid, but also has a hinged opening where the cards can be placed. To the lid he attached a tilt switch that triggers a Radio Shack sound player to provide the sounds. These sound modules are popular in a lot of projects like this doorbell hack. The final touch (aside from the droid decor on the outside) was to add a remote control car that lets his son drive R2 around.

We asked for more details and he delivered. You’ll find his lengthy description of the project after the jump.

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Star Wars Themed MAME Cabinet Is Perfect In This Basement Bar

January 8, 2013 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

Fans of the Star Wars series will immediately recognize these illuminated vertical bars as a piece of the style from the original movie. They decorate the MAME cabinet recently installed in this home bar. You’ve got to admit, it looks amazing. But we’re always on the prowl for the build log and this annotated 46 image set has no shortage of goodies.

The project started off as a very ordinary looking plywood frame. But it takes shape quickly as the rounded-over grills were added to the box. Holes were cut behind them to accept the acrylic that serves as a diffuser and to allow the LEDs to shine through from the inside. There are several shelves which will be used to store additional gaming systems in the future. For now all that’s inside is a pretty beefy computer that runs the emulators, allowing games to be played via the arcade buttons or using wireless Xbox controllers.

Make sure you get all the way to the end of the build images. We were delighted by the custom icons in the arcade buttons. Instead of the common player one and player two images there are silhouettes of Star Wars characters and objects. This attention to detail really makes the build something special!

[Thanks Jason]

Build A POV Death Star, You Will

October 1, 2012 by Mike Szczys 26 Comments

Building a Persistence of Vision globe is pretty awesome, but overlaying a Death Star pattern on the display takes it to the next level of geekery. Like us, [Jason] has wanted to build one of these for a long time. His success pushes us one step closer to taking the plunge and we hope it will inspire you to give it a shot too.

As he mentions in the beginning of his write up, the mechanical bits of these displays are really where the problems lie. Specifically, you need to find a way to transfer power to the spinning display. In this case use went with some DC motor brushes. These are replacement parts through which he drilled a hole to accept the metal axles on top and bottom. We hadn’t seen this technique before, but since motor brush replacements are easy to find and only cost a few bucks we’d say it’s a great idea.

The 24 blue LEDs that make up the display are all on one side of the PCB. They’re driven by an ATmega328 running the Arduino bootloader. [Jason] uses an FTDI adapter to program the chip. Don’t miss the video embedded after the break.

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