BuffaloFeeds » Hack A Day » October 22, 2009

Hack A Day (6 unread)

Unreasonably bright bike light apparently hunts deer

Posted: October 22nd, 2009, 2:00pm MDT by Mike Szczys

[Jukka] wanted a bike light that wasn’t afraid to go into the woods during the dark winter. He put together a lamp that uses eight 3 Watt LEDs to pump out 1680 lumens (english translation). The high power LEDs were mounted on a large aluminum heat sink and use lenses to optimize the beam of [...]
Drone Lab brings the excitement of Hypnotoad home

Posted: October 22nd, 2009, 1:00pm MDT by Mike Szczys

[Peter] tipped us off about his new synthesizer kit, Drone Lab. It has the things we look for a synthesizer: knobs, inputs, switches, wacky sounds. You can get your soldering on with the kit version, or buy these pre-built. Peter bills this as an open source kit but we didn’t see board artwork, just a [...]
Driving USB peripherals with Arduino

Posted: October 22nd, 2009, 11:44am MDT by Mike Szczys

Circuits@Home have managed to host a USB keyboard with an Arduino and display the keyboard inputs on a character LCD. This uses the USB host shield we covered in August. That host shield includes a MAX3421 which is used here to drive the character LCD. The control code for the keyboard ends up being fairly simple. [...]
Score online with robot soccer

Posted: October 22nd, 2009, 10:49am MDT by Mike Szczys

[Erik] and [Heni] have been using soccer as a way to improve code development techniques in robotics. Their soccer playing robots won first prize in the development competition at the 2007 RoboCup competition. They are using a teaching method they call Kinesthetic Bootstrapping to program the motions of the Bioloid robotic platform. The robots are [...]
Magic Mouse and MacBook teardowns

Posted: October 22nd, 2009, 9:00am MDT by Phil Burgess

The folks at iFixit must hold some kind of record for fastest-voided warranty. It’s been less than 48 hours since Apple unleashed a torrent of new computers and peripherals, and they’ve already set upon the new wares like a pack of ravenous, spudger-wielding Velociraptors, photoblogging the splayed entrails for our edutainment. The refreshed MacBook holds few surprises, resembling [...]
Gear clock

Posted: October 22nd, 2009, 8:00am MDT by Jakob Griffith

Analog clocks now a days get no respect. Everyone is digital this, or binary that, and we admit it is nice to look over and see the time promptly displayed. But there’s something about the quiet ticking and ominous feeling you get when around a large intricate clock that you know some serious time has [...]