If you’ve ever wondered why you’ve never seen a mechanical seven-segment display, now you know. They’re fairly complicated and most likely absurdly expensive, especially when a few light bulbs or LEDs would do the same job equally well. This didn’t stop [kiu] from completing his mechanical seven-segment clock he calls SevenBlocks, and for that we [...]
If you’re looking for something to do on a boring Sunday afternoon, how about dusting off your Arduino and playing a text adventure? [Louis] wrote in to tell us about his project called AZIP, an app that will let you play classic 1980s text adventures on your Arduino. The famous Infocom text adventure games such [...]
Over the last year, [James] has been a part of a few commercial projects that used a thermal receipt printer as part of the build. Something must have cracked in his mind, because [James] spent a lot of time developing a way to print customized content on receipt printers, connecting these printers to the Internet, and sharing [...]
[Roel] wanted to put a wireless weather station in his greenhouse. Even though the weather station was supposed to transmit over fairly long distances, the geometry of his back yard and a few stone walls killed the radio signal even after putting a good antenna on the receiving side of his wireless weather station setup. [...]
If you’ve ever scoffed at the idea of opening up iTunes every four minutes to rate a song, [Steve] is the guy to talk to. He built a small hardware box with five illuminated buttons to rate the current song playing on iTunes. This build comes after [Steve]‘s earlier Arduino-based rating box that was functional, but didn’t [...]
When you get down to it, solar cells aren’t much different from the diodes and transistors in your parts drawers or inside your beloved electronics. They’re both made of silicon or some other semiconductor, and surprisingly can produce electricity in the presence of light. Here’s two semiconductors-as-solar panel projects that rolled into the tip line [...]
When [Matt] came across a small video camera made to fit onto a keychain, the first thing that came to mind is a time-lapse video throwie. Like the LED + coin cell battery + magnet we’ve seen we’ve seen before (and deployed…), [Matt]‘s video throwie would be deployed in interesting spots for a few days [...]
Former Hackaday contributor [mikeysklar] has been trying to etch a QR code into a sheet of copper. Although his phone can’t read the CuR codes he’s made so far, he’s still made an impressive piece of milled copper. The biggest problem [mikey] ran into is getting Inkscape to generate proper cnc tool paths instead of [...]
This hurts our head You know you can ‘freeze’ drops of water in mid-air by flashing a LED at the right time, right? Well, according to this video you don’t even need a strobing light; just use the frame rate of the camera. Much cooler if you don’t know how it works, in our humble opinion. [...]
As an RF engineering student, [Camerin] is usually tasked with pointless yet educational endeavors by his advisor and professors. Most of the time (we hope) he sees the task through and ends up pulling something out of his hat, but a few days ago a professor dropped a bombshell on him. After reading this article on [...]
Linux is generally considered the go-to OS for under powered computers. Wanting to challenge the preconceived notion that Linux requires ‘a computer made in the last 20 years,’ [Dmitry] built the worst Linux PC ever around a simple 8-bit microcontroller. The ATMega1284p [Dmitry] used doesn’t have a lot to offer as far as RAM and storage goes; just 16 kilobytes [...]
An attentive reader tipped us off to the guys at Mobacken Racing (translation), a group of Swedes dedicated to the art and craft of putting jet and rocket engines on go karts and snowmobiles. One of the simpler builds is a pulse jet sled. Pulse jets are extremely simple devices – just a few stainless steel [...]
Here’s something we thought we’d never see on Hackaday. [Chris Suprock] is developing an artificial heart he calls Steel Heart. It’s an artificial heart powered by electromagnets and ferrofluids. The idea behind [Chris]‘ artificial heart is ingenious in its simplicity. An elastic membrane is stretched across a frame and a magnetic liquid (or ferrofluid, if you prefer) is poured across [...]
We may be showing our age here, but we have no idea what a ‘poke’ on Facebook actually means. Whether it’s the passive-aggressive manifestations of online stalkers or an extension of the ‘like’ button, all we know is [Jasper] and [Bartholomäus] built a machine that translates virtual pokes into our analog world. The “Poking Machine” as [Jasper] and [Bart] [...]
This 3D-printed model of the Tower Bridge is only 200 micrometers long. To put that into perspective, the distance between the towers is the width of a human hair. This model is the product of research at the additive manufacturing department of the Vienna University of Technology The models were fabricated much like normal stereolithography – a [...]
If you ever wanted your name out on the Internet, now is your time to shine. [Chris] hooked up an Arduino to the Internet and is streaming the results of combing through Twitter live to the entire world. The SocialBot9000, as [Chris] calls his build, is an Arduino Uno connected to an Ethernet shield and an LCD [...]
While function generators or analog signal generators are ubiquitous in their utility, we haven’t seen much of logic function generators on Hack a Day. Luckily, [Dilshan] sent in a really neat 8-channel signal injector that is amazingly simple to build and comes with a great front end for editing patterns from your computer. The hardware portion of [...]
[Excelangue] just posted a guide to using the free 3G connection in your Amazon Kindle to browse the Internet on your computer. The hack requires a Kindle Keyboard 3G and the free worldwide Internet access that comes along with the purchase price. After jailbreaking the Kindle and applying a USB network hack, [Excelangue] managed to connect his laptop [...]
Writing a paper in LaTeX will always result in beautiful output, but if you’d like to put that document up on the web you’re limited to two reasonable options: serve the document as a .PDF (with the horrors involves, although Chrome makes things much more palatable), or relying on third-party browser plugins like TeX The [...]
On the list of things we’ll build ‘when we get a few free weekends,’ an electric motorcycle is right at the top. With a 20-mile range, they may not be as versatile as a car or truck, but we can’t imagine a vehicle better suited for making a quick jaunt around town. [Ben Nelson] just finished [...]
It’s no secret that the 3D printer community is extremely fragmented. With three models of RepRaps, three printer kits from Makerbot, and hundreds of ‘printers of the week,’ it’s extremely frustrating for beginners to wrap their heads around the pros and cons of each machine. The software for these printers is segmented nearly as much [...]
After over a year of work, [dmw] is nearly done with his Humble Hacker Keyboard. It’s a keyboard that has been influenced by some pretty crazy looking designs, but meets all of [dmw]‘s needs for a compact, programmer-oriented key layout that’s easy to type on. [dmw] posted a pseudo-build log over at the geekhack keyboard forums. [...]
We’ve featured dozens of digital camera triggers over the years. Very rarely do we come across one as well designed as [Viktor]‘s ‘lil bang sound trigger that snaps a picture whenever a microphone picks up a loud noise. [Viktor]‘s build is based around a PIC16F microcontroller with an LM386 amp connected to a microphone. On the [...]
It’s not roses or jewelry, but we hope [Erik]‘s light-up USB heart will be appreciated by his significant other. When the two heart pieces come in contact with each other, each side lights up. [Erik] started his build by cutting two half-heart shaped pieces out of polycarbonate. After drilling a few holes for LEDs and wires, [...]
Remember those old wireless controllers made for the consoles of our youth like the NES and Super Nintendo? They didn’t work well, mostly owing to the fact they were built using the same infrared technology that is found in a remote control. Now that all the modern consoles are wireless, [micro] over at the nftgames [...]
Even though she’s only in 8th grade, [Hannah Prutchi] is turning into a very respectable builder. She designed SharkVision, a wearable distance sensor that is meant to help the blind find objects they might bump into. The SharkVision gets its name from shark’s ability to ‘see’ prey in their surroundings by sensing the local magnetic [...]
A month ago, we saw a marvelous demonstration of troll physics from YouTube user [Fredzislaw100]. In his video, we saw a circuit of three switches and three LEDs wired in series and but not acting like the should. A lot of the comments for this post elicited reasonable explanations like modifying the battery or pure camera wizardry via After Effects. Thankfully, [Alan] stepped [...]
Even though abstract expressionism died out several decades ago, robots are still chugging along dripping nihilistic pigment onto a cold, uncaring canvas. [Liat] and [Assaf] created a robot named The Originals Factory to create paintings in the style of abstract expressionism, a style of painting that is arguably best represented by [Jackson Pollock] and his ‘drip paintings.’ [...]
If you’d like a pseudo-mechanical way of producing a droning synthesizer sound, [gijs] is your man. He made a small synthesizer out of nothing but an old hard drive and a few components. Whenever a disk platter is spun manually, the spindle motor inside the drive produces a few out of phase sine waves on its [...]
In the interests of open communication in shared spaces, [dan] made a public text box that serves as a terminal to the @publictextbox twitter account. We could see something like this being useful in a hackerspace or other hang out to announce to the world the happenings of the resident makers and builders. The software setup [...]
If you’ve ever wanted to program a microcontroller “in the cloud,” you might want to head over to Inventor Town, an online IDE that allows you to write and compile firmware for the MSP430 series of microcontrollers. After logging in with your Google account, you’re presented with a ‘My Projects’ page. From there, you can [...]
When the Regency TR-1 transistor radio came out onto the market in the 1950s, it was hailed as a modern marvel of microelectronics. With only four transistors and a handful of other components, the TR-1 was a wonder of modern engineering. [Sprite_tm] may have those old-timers beat, though. He built an FM transmitter with the lowest [...]
[George] just finished his first project: an 8×8 matrix “Board of Many Ping-Pong Balls” with 64 RGB LEDs. He started this project when he was 14 years old and finished the build over this last Christmas break. We won’t make any presumptions about [George]‘s age, but we couldn’t think of a better project to start [...]
For a young geek in the 80s, the it computer was the IBM PCjr. On paper, it was a truly remarkable leap in technology. With a wireless keyboard, light pen, and optical mouse it was an impressive, if maligned, piece of hardware. There was a small problem with the optical mouse, though; it required a special [...]
If you’ve ever wanted to build an awesome tabletop game or model train layout scenery, you probably couldn’t do better than printing Minecraft worlds on a RepRap. This guide comes courtesy of [Nudel] who figured out how to use Mineways with his RepRap. While [Nudel]‘s landscape print doesn’t have the full color of something from Shapeways, he only spent $3 [...]
[David] sent in a nice project to demonstrate augmented reality with ARtoolkit and discuss the deep philosophical underpinnings of the meaning of nothingness. The good news is he was able to create a volume control button on a sheet of paper with a marker. The bad news is the philosophical treatment is a bit weak; [...]
It looks like Null Space Labs has a new pick and place machine. This immense repair job began when [Charliex] and [Gleep] found a JukiPlacemat 360 pick and place machine. The idea of having their very own pick and place machine proved intoxicating, possibly too much so because the didn’t return the machine when they found out [...]
There’s not much to be gained by living in a discotheque but colored lights are awesome, especially when they’re as well implemented as [michu]‘s StripInvaders. The StripInvaders project takes a gigantic 5 meter LED strip with WS2801 controllers and turns it into an Ethernet-enabled 24 bit display with the new Arduino Ethernet. While the Ethernet-enabled may seem a [...]
Ammo crate PCs have been around since Unreal Tournament LAN parties, but this one goes further back than that; [Simon] put an Apple II in an ammo crate. It’s a fitting anachronistic build from the same guy that built the TARDIS MAME cabinet. Thankfully, [Simon] didn’t tear apart an Apple IIc for this build. A [...]
[Maximilien] sent in a networking protocol built out of a LEGO train set. Unlike IP over Avian Carrier this system won’t be killed by plate-glass windows or birds of prey, but we’d hate to step on [Max]‘s work in bare feet. The system uses a USB flash drive to carry data around to different nodes. At each node, [...]
We don’t know why, but the Atari Jaguar is getting a lot of attention this week. [10P6] just came up with this Jaguar/CD combo that reminds us what Atari could have come up with in 1993. The build itself is relatively simple once you get past [kevincal]‘s ‘April Fools’ type joke he played on the Atari [...]
Chiptunes are great, and we can’t imagine a world without the Mega Man 2 soundtrack, but sometimes we all like a more 70′s style synth. This is where the Roninsynth steps in. It’s an Arduino shield that puts the basic components of a wall of synth into your pocket. Unlike the analog oscillators of yore, the Roninsynth [...]
[Allan] needed a small vacuum chamber to get all the air out of clear casting resin. Degassing is a simple step in casting that improves the finished product immensely. The problem, though, is building a vacuum chamber. [Allan]‘s chamber seems easy enough to build, and pulls enough air out to get to 0.1 atmospheres. After [...]
[Ed] is pretty old school. He loves the functionality of old industrial shop tools that have their own dedicated systems. With huge candy-like buttons, who wouldn’t? [Ed] decided to replicate this aesthetic by building a MAME controller for his Mach3 controlled router. [Ed] had a bunch of MAME buttons and joysticks sitting around from a forgotten [...]
Prolific Hack a Day author [Mike S] has been playing in his lab again and he’s come up with a neat way to talk to microcontrollers with an LCD monitor. The basic idea behind [Mike]‘s work isn’t much different from the weird and/or cool Timex Datalink watch from the 1990s. Despite the fancy dev board, the [...]
Maybe we’re a little bitter because we held on to our pumpkin futures well into November, but we’ve got to respect [Nick]‘s stock ticker ornament. It’s an Internet-connected Christmas ornament that queries stock prices and displays the change with an RGB LED. The build uses a Propeller Platform USB and the Propeller E-Net Module to pull stock [...]
The guys over at brainwagon just finished up ANGST, the Arduino n’ Gameduinio Satellite Tracker, a build that displays 160 different satellites in Earth orbit on any SVGA monitor. The build is of course based off an Arduino and Gameduino shield. A real-time clock is always needed for a satellite tracker, so a DS1307 RTC [...]
3D display technology is fairly limited. Most 3D displays out there rely on either prisms refracting light from a normal flat-panel display, or shooting lasers into some sort of space-filling device. A few researchers in Japan went with a more unconventional method of making a 3D display that actually lives up to the promises of [...]
A signal generator is a handy bit of kit and with the right components, it’s pretty easy to build one. Fabricating a proper signal generator probe is another matter entirely. [Frank]‘s DIY signal generator probe does exactly what it claims to, and is very cheap to boot. After [Frank] made a simple signal generator with [...]
The best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry. At least that’s what we’d tell ourselves if we couldn’t find a 30-year-old computer monitor. [Andrew] picked up an old IBM XT on eBay recently and tried to get the video working. He hasn’t seen any success yet, but the way he goes about [...]
Sometimes you don’t need a lot of horsepower to win a speed record. In a fluke of no one else competing in the alt fuel class, [John]‘s biodiesel motorcycle set a new land speed record at the LTA event last summer. [John]‘s bike is a junkyard 1978 Kawasaki KZ400. The stock engine was replaced with a [...]
[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 [...]
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 [...]
[John] has always loved stock ticker machines. These machines are highly collectible, so short of finding one that wasn’t hurled from a Manhattan skyscraper in 1929, a stock ticker is out of reach for the casual enthusiast. There is another way to get a stock ticker-like device though: hack a label printer to print out [...]
[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 [...]
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 [...]
[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 [...]
[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 [...]
[Markus Kayser] built an amazing solar powered SLS printer, but instead of using lasers and powdered plastics his machine uses the power of the sun to heat sand into complex shapes. [Markus]‘ printer uses the same concept as his earlier solar cutter – burning things with a magnifying glass. Interestingly, the printer isn’t controlled with [...]
We love ballistic trajectories and the smell of black powder in the morning, so we’re really interested in the wireless rocket launch pad sent in by [Brent Strysko]. [Brent] used an ATmega with an enc28j60 ethernet shield and wireless router to launch the rocket without a physical connection with ‘the button.’ Everything on the launchpad [...]
For some projects, it’s okay to have a microcontroller twiddling it’s thumbs most of the time. When a project requires the cpu to do just one thing over and over, there’s no loss with inefficient code – it either works or it doesn’t. However, if a project requires a microcontroller to do several things at [...]
[Scott] is a design and technology master’s student who just came up with The Imaginary Marching Band – virtual band instruments you can wear on your hand. Taking inspiration from Minority Report and the NES Power Glove, the system is able to emulate 6 instruments at this point – A trumpet, trombone, tuba, snare drum, [...]
Long before drum machines played samples from an SD card or EPROM, drum sounds were analog – just filtered waveforms and noise. To the modern eye, these are very primitive machines, but for [Andrew], they’re the inspiration for this brilliant hack. [Andrew] took a Roland CR-68 drum machine from 1978 and added MIDI input with the [...]
A new development kit for android was unveiled at the Google I/O 2011 developer conference that officially supports the Arduino. It looks like Google took a cue from Circuits@Home, because the interesting part of this dev kit is the fact that the shield can be put into USB Host mode. That’s great for phones and [...]