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Hack A Day (10 unread)

Followup: Troll physics solved

Posted: January 27th, 2012, 4:29pm MST by Brian Benchoff

A month ago, we saw a marvelous demonstration of troll physics from YouTube user [Fredzislaw100]. In his video, we saw a circuit of three switches and three LEDs wired in series and but not acting like the should. A lot of the comments for this post elicited reasonable explanations like modifying the battery or pure camera wizardry via After Effects. Thankfully, [Alan] stepped [...]
DSLR performance measured with audio editing software

Posted: January 27th, 2012, 3:29pm MST by Mike Szczys

[Jaroslav's] camera didn’t have a feature to measure the speed of its response in different modes so he figured out his own method. Using the microphone on his webcam he recorded the sound made by the mirror and shutter movements, then used Audacity to analyze the camera’s performance. When you get right down to it, [...]
[Jackson Pollock] is now a robot

Posted: January 27th, 2012, 2:29pm MST by Brian Benchoff

Even though abstract expressionism died out several decades ago, robots are still chugging along dripping nihilistic pigment onto a cold, uncaring canvas. [Liat] and [Assaf] created a robot named The Originals Factory to create paintings in the style of abstract expressionism, a style of painting that is arguably best represented by [Jackson Pollock] and his ‘drip paintings.’ [...]
How to add flair to a webpage that shows your project data

Posted: January 27th, 2012, 10:58am MST by Mike Szczys

This temperature display may not knock your socks off, but it’s a simple demonstration of how you can used vector graphics as a web readout for data (translated). [Luca] wrote this four page tutorial to help others, he makes it look really easy, and the sky’s the limit on eye candy once you get he basics [...]
Synthesize with a hard drive

Posted: January 27th, 2012, 9:01am MST by Brian Benchoff

If you’d like a pseudo-mechanical way of producing a droning synthesizer sound, [gijs] is your man. He made a small synthesizer out of nothing but an old hard drive and a few components. Whenever a disk platter is spun manually, the spindle motor inside the drive produces a few out of phase sine waves on its [...]
@publictextbox is a Twitter enabled phone booth

Posted: January 27th, 2012, 8:01am MST by Brian Benchoff

In the interests of open communication in shared spaces, [dan] made a public text box that serves as a terminal to the @publictextbox twitter account. We could see something like this being useful in a hackerspace or other hang out to announce to the world the happenings of the resident makers and builders. The software setup [...]
Sixty4Racer an 8×8 Game

Posted: January 27th, 2012, 6:01am MST by Kevin Dady

[Pete] has a cool new tutorial creating a re-imagining of the Atari classic “River Raid” for the PIX-6T4 micro controller based game system. The PIX is a netduino on a larger board featuring 2 analog controllers, a speaker, an sd card and an 8×8 monochrome LED display. With a resolution that low, it may make [...]
Analog Joypad for your Retro PC

Posted: January 26th, 2012, 2:01pm MST by Kevin Dady

Part of the fun with old computers is playing some old school games, and while you could play them with a keyboard it is much more fun with a joystick. You can get old joysticks all day long on auction sites, but you have to watch out. Some are digital, which wont work for many [...]
Program a microcontroller over the Internet

Posted: January 26th, 2012, 12:36pm MST by Brian Benchoff

If you’ve ever wanted to program a microcontroller “in the cloud,” you might want to head over to Inventor Town, an online IDE that allows you to write and compile firmware for the MSP430 series of microcontrollers. After logging in with your Google account, you’re presented with a ‘My Projects’ page. From there, you can [...]
[Sprite_tm]‘s three-component FM transmitter

Posted: January 26th, 2012, 11:36am MST by Brian Benchoff

When the Regency TR-1 transistor radio came out onto the market in the 1950s, it was hailed as a modern marvel of microelectronics. With only four transistors and a handful of other components, the TR-1 was a wonder of modern engineering. [Sprite_tm] may have those old-timers beat, though. He built an FM transmitter with the lowest [...]