BuffaloFeeds » Hack A Day » October 2, 2011

Hack A Day (7 unread)

How to build your own cat door

Posted: October 2nd, 2011, 3:01pm MDT by Mike Szczys

[Dino] continues his to satisfy his weekly hacking goal by building a cat door for his pets. He has a Habitat For Humanity resale store nearby that was doing a 50% off sale on doors. So he picked up a six-panel door and set to work. The first step is drawing out the opening and [...]
Robotic arm follows the movements of your own limbs

Posted: October 2nd, 2011, 3:01pm MDT by Mike Szczys

[Alejandro] and his friends recently finished a first prototype of scratch-built robotic arm. They’ve got some nice electronics bench equipment for use with a project like this, but for the actual fabrication work it’s off to the kitchen. As you can see in the video after the break, they’re using PVC as the stock material [...]
[Clement] sees the cargo bike and raises a bicycle cargo trailer

Posted: October 2nd, 2011, 2:01pm MDT by Mike Szczys

[Clement] and his friends were going on a long bike tour and needed a way to carry their gear along with them. They set to work and managed to build this cargo trailer from mostly reused materials. The only part of this trailer that is reused junk is the connection mechanism that lets you attach [...]
Page-turning book scanner roundup

Posted: October 2nd, 2011, 1:01pm MDT by Brian Benchoff

[Daniel] at diybookscanner.org posted a roundup of the best automatic book scanner builds to date. A lot of the comments on our last coverage of book scanners were summed up by [Spork] with, “No automatic page turning = no use.” Turning a page in a book with a robot is really hard, though, and these builds [...]
Star Wars Imperial March Played by Dual Floppy Drives

Posted: October 2nd, 2011, 11:01am MDT by Jeremy Cook

Although many have made some sort of music with improvised electronics, few sound as cool as this Imperial March from Star Wars played by two floppy drives. According to [Pawel], “It’s nothing new” and quite simple. This may be true as we’ve featured an Imperial March-playing floppy drive here before, but it was only one [...]
Bread Head makes AVR programming a snap

Posted: October 2nd, 2011, 9:01am MDT by Mike Nathan

[Quinn] over at Blondihacks has been working with AVR microcontrollers a lot recently, and wanted a quick way to program the ATtiny13a (her current AVR of choice) while the chip is still seated in a breadboard. To speed up code revision and testing, she built a small programming header that she calls the Bread Head. [...]
Sustainability Hacks: Thin client server

Posted: October 2nd, 2011, 7:00am MDT by Brian Benchoff

It’s not environmentally friendly, but most of us run a small home server 24 hours a day. A small server is a useful tool to have that unfortunately wastes a lot of energy. [kekszumquadrat]‘s thin client home server is actually a passable LAMP box that doesn’t draw a ton of power. [kekszumquadrat] started looking at [...]