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Hack A Day (11 unread)

$100 portable Wikipedia

Posted: October 13th, 2009, 4:50pm MDT by Zach Banks

OpenMoko, the company behind the FreeRunner open-source phone, released their latest product today: WikiReader. It’s a small mobile device for browsing Wikipedia. Rather than use a wireless network to pull data off of the web, it has local copy of the database on a 8GB microSD card. This approach has been used before, and it [...]
Jamin’ to Bach, Commodore 64 style

Posted: October 13th, 2009, 4:00pm MDT by Mike Szczys

[thrashbarg] missed the sounds of the Commodore 64 and longed to hear the great masters in 8-bit glory. To get his fix, he created a midi device using the original Sound Interface Device from those long-dead systems. He’s interfaced the MOS6581 SID with an Atmel AVR ATmega8 microcontroller. The receiving pin for the AVR’s UART [...]
OLPC pedal power

Posted: October 13th, 2009, 3:00pm MDT by Mike Szczys

A One Laptop Per Child group out of Afghanistan have come up with a way to power the XO using pedals. The system interfaces a set of pedals with the Freeplay hand-crank charger, freeing up both hands for typing. Although not as compact, using both legs makes power generation much easier. Apparently a child as [...]
Halloween props: flying crank ghost

Posted: October 13th, 2009, 2:00pm MDT by Mike Szczys

[Jake's] projects have become regular features here on Hack a Day. He keeps the Halloween hack-fest rolling with his Flying Crank Ghost. For the ghost he used a store-bought skull but sculpted some hands himself out of Styrofoam. The body is fashioned from coat hangers with a bit of creepy fabric draped over the hole [...]
Binary adder will give you slivers

Posted: October 13th, 2009, 1:00pm MDT by Mike Szczys

A while back we looked at [Matthias'] one-pin dot matrix printer. Now we’re jumping over to his woodworking website to feast on his wooden binary adding machine. His creation uses glass marbles as the data for this device. A resolution of up to six bits can be set on the top of the adder, then [...]
Robot Einstein could save humans from killbot destruction

Posted: October 13th, 2009, 12:00pm MDT by Mike Szczys

Earlier this year we saw the Einstein robot that is being developed to facilitate human facial emotions in robots. [David Hanson], the man in charge of this project, has given a TED talk on his work that includes a show-and-tell of his most recent progress. We’ve embedded the video after the break for your enjoyment. The [...]
Daft Punk replica helmet

Posted: October 13th, 2009, 11:00am MDT by Phil Burgess

For all their varied and entertaining uses, circuits and code comprise only part of the complete hacking experience. To really put your project over the top, sooner or later you’ll want to possess some physical fabrication skills. Consider the works of [Ben Heckendorn]: He’s always done a fantastic job with the electronics, but it’s the fit and finish of [...]
Haptic Halluc 2

Posted: October 13th, 2009, 10:00am MDT by Caleb Kraft

We can not express the childlike glee that we experienced watching this video. We want so badly to have one of these setups. What you are seeing is a half dome projected cockpit with two haptic controllers in the style of a delta robot. This is controlling the Halluc robot which is a hybrid wheeled [...]
How to populate a surface mount PCB

Posted: October 13th, 2009, 9:01am MDT by Mike Szczys

Let’s face it friends, everything is moving toward surface mount components. We’ve seen quite a few features here that cover using stencils to populate boards and using ovens to reflow. [Oleg] has put together a tutorial on the process he uses to populate and reflow his own boards. [Oleg] is the creator of the USB Isolator [...]
DIY Dyson vac hack

Posted: October 13th, 2009, 8:00am MDT by Phil Burgess

[James Dyson] may have built eleventy billion prototypes to perfect his famous cyclonic vacuum, but sometimes just one will do the trick. A cyclonic separator is used in workshops to keep larger cruft out of the dust collection system. The airflow inside a separator creates a vortex that flings heavier bits and particles to the periphery [...]
A different breed of camera controllers?

Posted: October 13th, 2009, 7:25am MDT by Jakob Griffith

We’ve covered almost every way possible to remotely control a camera setup, from lasers, to Lego, to doorbells, and even having a Nintendo DS run the show. But at the end of the day, what if you want something that’s small, simple, has amazing flexibility for future additions, and most importantly doesn’t take away your [...]