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Hack A Day (7 unread)

Balancing cube looks more like a star

Posted: May 19th, 2010, 3:00pm MDT by Mike Szczys

This art-meets-robot has the grueling task of standing on one foot all day long while other robots get to bend to their heart’s content. It balances on that single point by adjusting its center of gravity with six pendulum-like appendages. To make the system more like the Borg, each of those six modules shares sensor [...]
Arduino based EATC replacement

Posted: May 19th, 2010, 2:00pm MDT by Mike Szczys

The Electronic Automatic Temperature Control Module on [Dan Mattox's] 2000 Ford Taurus bit the dust. The junkyards in the area didn’t have a matching replacement and a new one is pretty hard to come by so he built an EATC replacement from an Arduino Mega. It includes a solenoid controller board for the vent selector, [...]
Shredding to Street Fighter

Posted: May 19th, 2010, 12:00pm MDT by Mike Szczys

Strumming to punch and changing frets to move, [Alan Chatham] plays Street Fighter using his guitar. It’s been modified to use OpenChord, an open source guitar controller package he developed. This was originally meant to be used with Guitar Hero and the like but as he mentions in the video after the break, it is [...]
Cramming more pixels into a Thinkpad

Posted: May 19th, 2010, 11:00am MDT by Mike Szczys

Not willing to settle for 1400×1050 on his Thinkpad, [Lawrence Sheed] set out to upgrade the LCD screen. He ordered a 15″ replacement screen that brought the eye candy up to an impressive 2048×1536 QXGA format. The replacement fits perfectly for a nice factory look. Other than some delicate disassembly you might need to flash [...]
Solder station hack adds temperature control

Posted: May 19th, 2010, 10:00am MDT by Mike Szczys

Take that cheap fire stick you call a soldering iron and turn it into a real tool. [Giorgos Lazaridis] turned his 30 watt soldering iron into a temperature controlled soldering station by adding a thermistor just above the tip to monitor how hot things are getting. A MAX6675 takes care of the thermocouple and shoots [...]
32 LED POV globe

Posted: May 19th, 2010, 9:00am MDT by Caleb Kraft

Here’s a slick version of a POV globe(google translated). Created by [Riko], this globe has 32 LEDs and is powered by a rotating coil. The layout looks fairly solid in operation, with the POV effect showing up very nicely on camera. You can get the schematics and source code from the project page. We found [...]
Mister Gloves, gesture input

Posted: May 19th, 2010, 8:05am MDT by Jakob Griffith

This two handed glove input setup, by [Sean Chen] and [Evan Levine], is one step closer to achieving that [Tony Stark] like workstation; IE, interacting with software in 3D with simple hand gestures. Dubbed the Mister Gloves, the system incorporates accelerometer, push button, and flex sensor data over RF where an MCU converts it to [...]