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100 Articles

Space Invader Button

April 14, 2009 by 36 Comments

spaceinvaderbutton

[Marcus] saw [Alex]’s 64 pixel project and decided it could be implemented in even less space. Pictured above is his Space Invader button with a bicolor LED matrix. The controller board is all SMD and piggybacked on the matrix. An ATmega164P drives the 24 pins via transistors. In addition to animation, the board can do LED sensing too. It’s a very clever project and [Marcus] has some notes about working with such tiny components. You can see a video of it below. Continue reading “Space Invader Button” →

Automated Drum

March 29, 2009 by 25 Comments

snaredrum

A team of three PhD students constructed this ‘multi-mallet automatic drumming instrument (Madi)‘. Their Expressive Machines Musical Instruments site is dedicated to building instruments like this and they recently showed their work at the first annual Guthman Musical Instrument Competition. A ‘low-stakes X Prize’ for musical instruments. 25 applicants were chosen to show their unique musical instruments for $10K in prizes. We like the team’s Madi because it’s adapting a traditional instrument and then pushing it to the limit. It reminds us of the Crazy J mechatronic guitar from 2005. You can see a video of the Madi playing below.

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SNES Toaster

March 22, 2009 by 17 Comments

nintoaster

From the same person who brought you the NES toaster comes the Super Nintoaster. It looks like the most difficult part of the construction was extending the cartridge connector. The slider button works as the power button. The toast control now changes the brightness of the glowing red LEDs. Video introduction embedded below.

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Apple Logo Secondary Monitor

March 13, 2009 by 22 Comments

macbook

MacMod member [EdsJunk] has modified the Apple logo on his MacBook to act as a second video display (cache). There’s a video embedded below showing it playing Quicktime videos and the iTunes visualizer. Unfortunately there aren’t any details of the hardware used. From the display settings, it looks to have a resolution of at least 640×480. We hope to see more details soon.

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Pandora Case Prototype

January 28, 2009 by 23 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6T6zzV1vmOI]

The last time we checked in on Pandora it was just being shown in dev unit form. Embedded above is a video of the first case prototype. It doesn’t have any components yet, but it definitely looks like a good formfactor with a lot of potential. The Pandora is a Linux based portable game console with an 800×480 touchscreen.

[via Gizmodo]

Automated Wire Cutter And Stripper

January 3, 2009 by 13 Comments

witecutter

Kit builder oomlout—we’ve featured their servo bot—needed to produce a lot of precut wires. After cutting and stripping more than their fair share, they decided to apply some heavy engineering to make things easier. They constructed a machine to do the job for them. It has three main components: a servo driven wire feeder to measure the length, a two servo wire stripper that uses an exacto blade, and finally a wire cutter made from snips and a drill motor. The machine is controlled using an Arduino. They’ve published all the plans and code to Thingiverse incase anyone else wants to build a similar machine for their own kit shop. A video of the machine is embedded below.

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