Reverse Swear Box Curses (For) You

July 19, 2016 by Moritz Walter 19 Comments

If you are running out of swear words to comment the magic smoke coming from your electronics, [Howard] has just the right weekend project for you: The reverse swear box. Most swear boxes would have you drop in a coin as penance for uttering your choice phrases. Instead, at the touch of a button, this obscure but classy device randomly suggests a four letter swear word and displays it on a 14-segment LED display for immediate or later use.

It’s built upon an ATmega168 and only requires a minimum of external components. The schematics and firmware for this project are freely available on the project page. There’s also an extremely profane header file, packed with 37 case-insensitive four-letter words you may not actually want to include in your toolkit. On the other hand, many of these words score intimidatingly well at Scrabble.

You Are Fined 1 Credit For A Violation Of The Verbal Morality Statute

March 20, 2014 by Mike Szczys 55 Comments

demolition-man-verbal-morality-monitor

Some citizens can control their language and others cannot. What is a civilized society to do? In a dystopian future you can count on electronic monitoring. But wait, the future is now… or it will be in a few weeks. [Tdicola] is building the verbal morality monitor from Demolition Man as his entry in Hackaday’s ongoing Sci-Fi Contest.

Currently the project is in the early planning phase, but holy cow this is a fantastic idea! For those that didn’t see the glorious 1993 feature film, the young [Stallone] pictured above is accepting a ticket (as in: he must pay for his violation) from the tattle-tale wall-mounted computer. Everything about this device is completely feasible using today’s tech. It needs voice recognition and a list of naughty words, a way to play a pre-recorded message, and a printer to spit out the tickets. The build log for the project outlines all of this, as well as possible cost and sources for each.

We’ve been wondering who it was that injected an Artificial Intelligence into our project hosting system. We see both [tdicola] and [colabot] are on the team for this build. The names are too conveniently similar to be a coincidence, don’t you think?

Naughty Duck Will Be The End Of Secret Santa At Your Place Of Work

December 13, 2011 by Mike Szczys 26 Comments

Aw, isn’t he cute? Looks are deceiving, because if you get him started, this duck says some vulgar things. [Gigavolt] found the little guy abandoned at the Goodwill store and decided it might have some hacking potential. Boy was he right. The stock toy can already sing a tune while flapping its beak and wings. After spending some time in [Gigavolt’s] lair, this duck is going to be on the naughty list. The best part is that this is going to end up in the hands of someone else thanks to a Secret Santa exchange.

The build article linked above is safe for you to read at work, but the video embedded after the break most certainly is not. [Gigavolt] got to work replacing the integrated circuit inside with his own PIC 16F628 microcontroller. He uses a new audio track, which is played back by a SOMO-14D audio player board. The two use different input voltage levels which is something of a bother, but it’s a standby power drain that has been vexing [Gigavolt] he rolled his own board using the DorkbotPDX order and can’t figure out why the current consumption is so high. Take a look at the cursing duck, then see if you can’t troubleshoot his electrical issues.

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