Interactive LED Table

Some hackers make functional things that you can’t allow to be seen in polite company. Others make beautiful things that could come from a high-end store. [Marija] falls into the second category and her interactive LED coffee table would probably fetch quite a bit on the retail market. You can see a video of the awesome-looking table, below.

It isn’t just the glass, MDF, and pine construction. There’s also a Bluetooth interface to a custom Android application from [Dejan], who collaborated on the project. However, if you aren’t comfortable with the woodworking, [Marija’s] instructions are very detailed with great pictures so this might be a good starter project.

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Rubik’s Cube Table Has A Hidden Surprise

[Nothorwitzer] built a pretty incredible Rubik’s Cube table with hidden storage. The coolest feature of this table is the way it opens. Twisting the top section of the cube causes two drawers to pop out from the sides. The further you turn the top, the more the drawers extend. As the top hits its rotational limit, the lid of the cube lifts up, revealing the entire top section is hollow.

[Nothorwitzer] built the table from plywood, hardboard, and MDF. Hiding inside the base is an old car wheel hub and bearing. The entire rotating system spins on this assembly. The drawers are actuated by an ingenious set of plywood cams which push the two opposing drawers out as the top assembly rotates. Two levers pop the top open.

The attention to detail here is amazing. [Nothorwitzer] build a set of hidden hinges that make the lid invisible, yet allows it to lift up and over the edge of the cube. A spring ensures that the heavy lid will pop open neatly. The lid fit is so close that air pressure ensures the top doesn’t slam down when it is dropped.

While the internal parts of the table are left in bare wood, that the external parts had to match a real Rubik’s Cube. [Nothorwitzer] scrambled a cube, then copied the colors. The panels are made of cut hardboard. Each panel is spray painted, then hot glued to the cube. The body is plywood which [Nothorwitzer] grooved with a router to match the profile of a real Rubick’s Cube.

The project doesn’t end here. [Nothorwitzer] has created a second cube, which is even more tricky. The lid pops by pressing in one section. The drawers operate in a similar way, but there is a lever to engage or disengage the drawer opening. This may be the perfect place to hide your retro gaming systems!

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A Massive Adjustable Standing Desk From Scratch

Standing at your desk all day is healthier by far than sitting, but the commercial options tend to be expensive. [drivenbyentropy] had to contend with a heater right where the desk would go, but building an adjustable office desk to accommodate it turned out — well — gorgeous.

Two 18″ heavy duty 12 V DC actuators raise and lower the desk with a 600 lbs static load capacity and 200 lbs of  lifting load each. One actuator is actually slightly faster than the other, so instead of working out something fancy, [drivenbyentropy] simply extended the cable length on the faster actuator to disguise the difference.

Framed with some standard 2×4’s and sheathed with plywood, the massive four by eight foot desk has twelve ball-bearing drawer slides in the legs to add stability and smooth out height adjustments. Because of its size and having to build around the heating unit, the desk is stuck in the room since it does not easily come apart. There is, however, easy access to the two electronics compartments for troubleshooting!

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Scissor Lift Table From The Wood Shop, For The Wood Shop

The value of a mobile adjustable height cart in the shop can’t be overestimated. From moving tools around to installing heavy fixtures on walls and ceiling, a scissor-lift platform is a great tool. Commercial versions get a bit expensive, though, so a shop-built scissor lift table made of wood might be a nice project for the budget-minded to tackle.

Wood might not be your first choice for a fixture such as this, but it’s what [Marius Hornberger] is set up to use, and with proper species selection and careful engineering, it can make for an amazingly sturdy table. [Marius] chose ash for his parts, a wood with a long history of performing well under difficult conditions. The table is not all wood, of course; metal bushings and pins are used in the scissor mechanism, and the lift drive is a stout Acme-thread screw and nut. We’re impressed by [Marius]’ joinery skill, and with how sturdy the table proved to be.

Not a lot of woodworking projects seem to show up in our tip line for some reason, which is a shame. We love to feature wood builds, and like our own [John Baichtal] recently pointed out, the health of the wood shop is often a leading indicator of the health of a hackerspace.

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A Table From Beyond Infinity

Infinity mirrors are some far-out table mods and make a great centerpiece. Instructables user [bongoboy23] took a couple steps beyond infinity when designing this incredible table tailor-made for our modern age.

Poplar and pine wood make up the framing, and red oak — stained and engraved — make for a chic exterior. Programmed with Arduino and run on a Teensy 3.1, the tabletop has 960 LEDs in forty sections. There are, four USB ports hidden behind sliding panels, as well as a two-port AC outlet and an inductive charging pad and circuit.  A hidden Adafruit TFT touchscreen display allows the user to control the table’s functions. Control is limited to changing lighting functions, but Pac-Man, Snake, and text features are still to come!

Weighing in at $850, it’s not a cheap build, but it looks amazing.

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A Smart Table For Gamers

When makers take to designing furniture for their own home, the results are spectacular. For their senior design project, [Phillip Murphy] and his teammates set about building a smart table from the ground up. Oh, and you can also use it to play games, demonstrated in the video below.

The table uses 512 WS2812 pixels in a 32 x 16 array which has enough resolution to play a selection of integrated games — Go, 2-player Tetris, and Tron light cycle combat — as well as some other features like a dancing bird party mode — because what’s the point of having a smart table if it can’t also double as rave lighting?

A C2000-family microcontroller on a custom board is the brains, and is controlled by an Android app via Bluetooth RN-42 modules. The table frame was designed in Sketchup, laser-cut, and painstakingly stained. [Murphy] and company used aluminum ducting tape in each of the ‘pixels’, and the table’s frame actually forms the pixel grid. Check out the overview and some of the games in action after the break.

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Touch Sensitive Cement With Just A Dash Of Neon

For quite some time now we’ve seen people casting their own countertops and other surfaces out of cement. It’s a combination of mold-making and surface finishing that produces a smooth and durable surface at quite a low cost, if you don’t factor in damage done to your back when lifting the thing for installation.

This offering is a little bit different. [Elliott Spelman] built his own touch sensitive cement table top. When you place your grubby hands on the polished surface, a loop of neon lighting is switched on. This is thanks to a 4:1 mix of quick setting cement and iron oxide powder. Bare copper wire was laid around the edges of the surface to be encased by the cement for making connections later.

There were some sad moments when [Elliott] was removing the cast surface from the mold. He ended up cracking it and suggests others be liberal with their use of both wax on the mold before casting, and patience in removing the cement afterward. We might also suggest a strengthening agent like fiber reinforcement. The edges and surface can be sanded to the finish desired and in this case, attaching table legs was easy since the wooden underside of the mold remains on the bottom of the cement.

The neon lighting adds a retro touch to this build. It’s sad to see this technology dying away, so a resurgence of artisanal neon is great in our book. [Elliott] found a Bay Area arts collective called the Crucible which does a lot of art glass education to help him make two hoops of glass tube and fill them with the appropriate gasses. A capacitive touch sensor (once Atmel, now Microchip part) AT42QT2120 (datasheet) monitors the wire coming from the slab and switches the power supply for the tubes using a combination of relay board and Arduino Uno.

We find the prospect of positional sensing in doped cement fascinating. Anyone have ideas for adapting this technique so that a more long and narrow slab could have positional awareness within, say, a few inches? Let us know in the comments.

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