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Hack A Day (30 unread)

Dustbin computer lets you clean and prototype with a Neato XV-11

Posted: August 30th, 2011, 5:02pm MDT by Mike Szczys

So you bought yourself a Neato XV-11 and your floors have never been cleaner. The only problem is that you want to hack around with the hardware without losing your floor-sweeping minion. [Hash] found a solution to the issue by building a computer inside of the dustbin module. You can see at the center of [...]
My first robot: A simple demo to get kids excited about robotics

Posted: August 30th, 2011, 4:01pm MDT by Mike Nathan

[Will] from Revolt Lab needed a project to get the summer campers he supervises interested in electronics, but when your audience is 5 years old, your subject matter had better be simple, yet interesting enough to hold their attention at length. He settled on using a Lego NXT robot to keep their little minds engaged, [...]
Knock lock with logic chips

Posted: August 30th, 2011, 3:01pm MDT by Brian Benchoff

[Eric] needed a project for his digital logic design class, and decided on a lock that open in response to a specific pattern of knocks. This is a fairly common project that we’ve seen a few builds with ‘knock locks,’ but this one doesn’t use a microcontroller. Instead, it uses individual logic chips. The lock [...]
Hunting down farmyard pests with technology

Posted: August 30th, 2011, 2:02pm MDT by Mike Nathan

[Snypercat] makes no bones about the fact that she despises rats, and does everything in her power to keep them off her farm. We can’t blame her though – they spread disease, eat other animals’ food, and can get your farm shut down if there are too many running about. While most of us might hire [...]
DIY Electron Accelerator

Posted: August 30th, 2011, 1:08pm MDT by Kevin Dady

Reader [Xellers] sent in his newest instructable: DIY Electron Accelerator: A Cathode Ray Tube in a Wine Bottle. While not exactly what you might think of a cathode ray tube, the basics are in place. A wine bottle is used as a vacuum chamber and a 9kv neon transformer is attached to a stopped in [...]
A cellphone based Interactive Voice Response System

Posted: August 30th, 2011, 12:08pm MDT by Mike Szczys

We’re all familiar with IVRS systems that let you access information using a touch-tone telephone. [Achu Wilso] built his own version which uses a cellphone, microcontroller, and computer. The cellphone is monitored by an LM324 op-amp with an attached 555 timer chip. When a call comes in the voltage on the headphone output goes high, [...]
Retractable iPad dock for the kitchen

Posted: August 30th, 2011, 11:08am MDT by Mike Szczys

[Evan Flint] and his wife use a lot of online recipes in the kitchen. Rather than printing them out, they bought an iPad as a cooking companion. But in their cramped kitchen he needed to find a place for the high-end hardware that is out-of-the-way yet accessible. Some head scratching and parts bin diving led [...]
Water vortex exhibit repair gives a look at the bearing and gasket design

Posted: August 30th, 2011, 10:07am MDT by Mike Szczys

[Ben Krasnow's] water vortex machine has been an exhibit in the lobby of the San Jose City Hall for quite some time now. Unfortuantely he recently had to perform some repair work on it due to the parts inside the water chamber rusting. This is the same water vortex that we saw about a year ago. [...]
Guitar pickup winding workstation

Posted: August 30th, 2011, 9:07am MDT by Brian Benchoff

After a bit of inspiration, [Pete] decided to build a solid body electric guitar for himself. Instead of assembling a conglomeration of off-the-shelf parts, he plans on building just about everything from scratch. This includes the guitar pickups, so he built himself a pickup winder that has measures RPM, ETA until done, and auto stop [...]
Crazy slingshot guy at it again with a 220 lb steel ball cannon

Posted: August 30th, 2011, 8:06am MDT by Mike Nathan

Good old [Jörg Sprave]. That guy just doesn’t quit building insane slingshots. If he’s not honing his machete slinging skills in preparation for the zombie apocalypse, he’s blowing out car windows with giant steel balls. The huge cannon you see above is modeled off a small slingshot he made a while back, which fired 8mm [...]
Engine Hacks: Adding fuel injection to a riding lawnmower

Posted: August 30th, 2011, 7:00am MDT by Jack Buffington

Are you tired of fiddling with the engines on your lawn equipment every spring, trying to get them to run again? [jhark] was and decided to do something about it by converting his riding lawnmower over to fuel injection. After stealing a fuel injector from his van and bolting it onto the mower’s carburetor, he [...]
Monitoring water levels with a Parallax Ping sensor

Posted: August 30th, 2011, 5:06am MDT by Mike Nathan

When you need a mechanism to detect the water level within a container or tank, you have several different options. Most people opt for a simple float or probe that sits in the water, while others use optics to sense when the water is reaching an undesired level. This device built by [Danilo Abbasciano] uses [...]
Speaker-mounted WAV player for street performances

Posted: August 29th, 2011, 4:14pm MDT by Mike Szczys

This naked speaker is the basis for [MaoMakMaa's] newest project called the Wavedrone. He plans on using the autonomous and cable-less device during street performances. You can hear the effect of some stretched jazz cords being played on it in the video clip after the break. The sound is kind of an ethereal background noise that observers might [...]
Chumby controlled mechanum wheel robot

Posted: August 29th, 2011, 3:14pm MDT by Mike Szczys

[Madox] gutted an Insignia Infocast to use with this robot. Insignia is Best Buy’s house brand and they partnered with Chumby to make their Infocast line. If you can find a used or clearance model it’s a great way to get yourself and embedded Linux board for a project like this one. The body and [...]
[Easton's] animatronic hand gets 3D printed upgrade

Posted: August 29th, 2011, 2:14pm MDT by Mike Szczys

[Easton] as been working with [Jeremy Blum] to come up with the newest version of his animatronic hand. You may remember seeing [Easton's] first animatronic hand, with which he won his regional science fair and made a trip to nations. Since then he’s been working on improvements, and with access to [Jeremy's] Makerbot he harnessed [...]
Using an LED cube as an audio visualizer

Posted: August 4th, 2011, 2:33pm MDT by Brian Benchoff

[Isaac] sent in his mashup build of a LED cube combined with a graphic EQ meter. The build is fairly simple and from the video we can tell that his build would be a great installation in a dubstep venue. While it’s not the 9x9x9 cube possible with some judicious coding we think it’s a [...]
Would you like to play a game?

Posted: August 4th, 2011, 1:01pm MDT by Kevin Dady

[Itay] dropped a link in our inbox about creating a simple video game system using Arduino. Yes we all know where that is going … the TV out library for Arduino. However this tutorial should still be mentioned because it pretty much covers everything someone new would need to quickly and easily hook one of [...]
Prison inmates: The world’s least admirable hackers

Posted: August 4th, 2011, 12:01pm MDT by Mike Nathan

One thing that always amazes us is the ingenuity displayed by prison inmates, as demonstrated in the tools and weapons they create while under the watchful eye of the law. Unlike most people however, these individuals have nothing but time on their side, which lends to the wide range of implements they inevitably dream up. [...]
An Arduino board for your tiniest of projects

Posted: August 4th, 2011, 10:50am MDT by Mike Nathan

Instructables user [dustinandrews] just took the wraps off his latest creation, a DIY Arduino Pro Mini clone. Actually, to call it an clone is technically incorrect – while he aimed to produce a tiny Arduino-compatible board, his goal was not to replicate the Mini’s design. Instead, he developed a 1” x 1” board from scratch, [...]
The Lego Synchro Drive

Posted: August 4th, 2011, 7:02am MDT by Jeremy Cook

[M-byte] wrote in to tell us about the Lego Synchro Drive. Although not a new hack, this autonomous vehicle is quite amazing in it’s simplicity. Using only one motor turning at a constant speed, this device is able to navigate obstacles by simply turning. As [m-byte] was quick to point out, this is a simple [...]
Air conditioner regulation using a hobby servo

Posted: August 4th, 2011, 5:02am MDT by Mike Nathan

For anyone that works in a large office building, odds are you know the pains of dealing with a poorly regulated HVAC system. [Robovergne] and his co-workers recently moved to a new location, and found that the air conditioning control was less than effective, leaving the office as hot as a sauna or as cold [...]
An ARM dev board you can make at home

Posted: August 3rd, 2011, 5:01pm MDT by Brian Benchoff

[BarsMonster] just challenged our conceptions of ARM development with his single-sided development board that’s loaded with an STM32F100 (PDF warning) ARM microcontroller. The board is remarkably simple – just a regulator, resistor and a few caps are necessary to get a $1 ARM μC up and running. [BarsMonster] gave us a schematic of his board along [...]
DIY Propeller-based ECG

Posted: August 3rd, 2011, 4:01pm MDT by Mike Nathan

[Ray] likes to build all sorts of Propeller-based projects, but one of the more interesting items we came across was this DIY ECG. While we have covered other DIY electrocardiograms before, he left the breadboard behind and put together a nicely done PCB for his build. The ECGs design should be pretty familiar to anyone [...]
Dedicated hacker adds USB capabilities to his Commodore 64

Posted: August 3rd, 2011, 3:01pm MDT by Mike Nathan

To say that Commodore 64 aficionados are a dedicated group would be quite the understatement. There are still quite a few individuals that spend all sorts of time building and programming for the C64 in order to make using them enjoyable, and to keep up to date with current technologies. [Luigi] is one of these [...]
RepRap voyeurism

Posted: August 3rd, 2011, 2:01pm MDT by Mike Szczys

Hey everybody, [Nbitwonder] is building his own RepRap 3D printer. What’s special about that? Well, not much and and lot all at the same time. The art of building a self-replicating 3d printer still has a lot to do with luck and forum-crawling to make all of the decisions that go into this complicated project. [...]
Microsoft’s attempt at an Arduino killer — feels like a gimmick

Posted: August 3rd, 2011, 12:24pm MDT by Mike Szczys

Microsoft has thrown its hat into the open source hardware hobby market. Their offering is called the Gadgeteer. We’d love to tell you all about it, but the big M didn’t make it very easy to find out about the device and it’s addons. When we set out to find what processor is running on [...]
Peltier powered sous-vide rig gets it right every time

Posted: August 3rd, 2011, 11:24am MDT by Mike Nathan

It seems that sous-vide cooking is becoming increasingly popular lately. [Meseta] caught the sous-vide bug and wanted to try his hand at it, though he did not have enough money for a premade sous-vide cooker. After seeing a good handful of lackluster DIY sous-vide rigs online, he decided that he would design and build a [...]
How to add modular tools to your soldering platform

Posted: August 3rd, 2011, 10:01am MDT by Mike Szczys

[Patenomics] has had some trouble finding a suitable place to work on projects in his tiny apartment. Lately he’s taken to using the stove top as a soldering platform and was looking for ways to protect the stove while adding functionality. He built this soldering platform from a couple chunks of pegboard and some hardware store parts. [...]
Come see what’s cooking in the Arduino kitchen

Posted: August 3rd, 2011, 8:02am MDT by Mike Nathan

The crew that brought you the Arduino is always hard at work trying to bring the community closer together and to foster collaborative development. They recently rolled out a new feature on their site that is sure to be of interest to Arduino veterans and neophytes alike. Arduino Labs is a platform which the team [...]
A 3D Printed Aerial Drone

Posted: August 3rd, 2011, 7:02am MDT by Jeremy Cook

Drones come in many shapes and sizes, but now they can also be 3d printed! To make these drones, the [Decode] group used a selective laser sintering process which is pretty interesting in itself. Once the printing process is done, these little planes are built with only five structural and aerodynamic components. Because of their [...]