BuffaloFeeds » Items by Phil Burgess

Feeds

104649 items (96858 unread) in 19 feeds

Friends

Build

MAKE Magazine (20223 unread)

Instructables.com (34656 unread)

Hack A Day (4913 unread)

Toolmonger (7725 unread)

Heads

News

fun

Items by Phil Burgess

Behind the scenes of a 1K graphics demo

Posted: August 8th, 2010, 1:00pm MDT by Phil Burgess

Programmer/designer [Steven Wittens] has posted a fantastic write-up on the black art of producing compact demo code, dissecting his own entry in the 1K JavaScript Demo Contest. The goal is to produce the best JavaScript demo that can be expressed in 1024 characters or less and works reliably across all standards-compliant web browsers. [Wittens] details several techniques [...]

BAMF2010: Look sir, droids!

Posted: May 27th, 2010, 11:00am MDT by Phil Burgess

Ask any engineer what originally sparked their interest in technology, and almost universally the response will be a Hollywood film or TV robot — Star Wars’ R2-D2, the B9 robot from Lost in Space, or Short Circuit’s Johnny 5, to name a few. Engineers need a creative outlet too, and some pay homage to their inspirations by building elaborate reproductions. At [...]

BAMF2010: DIY electroluminescent displays

Posted: May 27th, 2010, 7:32am MDT by Phil Burgess

In this video from Maker Faire, [Jon Beck] of CLUE — the Columbia Laboratory for Unconventional Electronics — demonstrates the unexpected ease of creating custom electroluminescent (EL) displays using materials from DuPont and common t-shirt screen printing tools. Eagle-eyed reader [ithon] recognized the Hack a Day logo among the custom shapes, which escaped our notice at the time. Sorry, Jon! Very cool [...]

Bay Area Maker Faire 2010 video

Posted: May 26th, 2010, 7:52am MDT by Phil Burgess

Since the previously-posted stills can’t quite convey the chaos of last weekend’s Maker Faire, here’s some video from the event to help get you through hump day. It’s like three liters of Jolt Cola in a two liter bottle. One thing even video can’t adequately capture is our gratitude toward our readers at the show who took [...]

Bay Area Maker Faire 2010 in pictures

Posted: May 24th, 2010, 3:57pm MDT by Phil Burgess

Just when you think it couldn’t possibly get any bigger and crazier, they manage to outdo themselves again. The Bay Area Maker Faire wrapped up Sunday evening, but we have so many story leads that we’ll probably be busy until next year’s event. In the meantime, here’s just a tiny, random sampling of the countless delights that greeted visitors this [...]

Permalink for 'Hack_A_Day/2010/05/24/BAMF2010__Spy_TRAKR_%e2%80%93_no_lasers___14_861_cheaper'

BAMF2010: Spy TRAKR – no lasers, $14,861 cheaper

Posted: May 24th, 2010, 10:00am MDT by Phil Burgess

Maybe $15K for an elaborate balancing telepresence robot is a bit out of one’s league. In that case, another Bay Area Maker Faire exhibitor — Wild Planet — has you covered. Faire attendees got a hands-on sneak preview of the upcoming Spy Video TRAKR, a video-transmitting radio-controlled toy that’s programmable and extensively hackable. The TRAKR [...]

BAMF2010: QB goes to meetings, shoots lasers from eyes

Posted: May 24th, 2010, 7:14am MDT by Phil Burgess

No, it’s not an extra from Wall-E. “QB” is the latest telepresence robot from Silicon Valley firm Anybots. QB combines two-way videoconferencing with a Segway-style self-balancing platform. The idea is to provide mobility and more natural interaction than desktop-tethered conferencing can provide. The 35 pound robot’s battery runs for six to eight hours, and the [...]

BAMF2010: CMT 380X Blackbird

Posted: May 23rd, 2010, 4:03pm MDT by Phil Burgess

Okay, we lied, we totally want one of these too. The CMT 380X Blackbird is one wicked hybrid car! Looking like it just rolled off the set of the next Batman film, the Blackbird is the brainchild of Electronic Arts Chief Creative Director [Richard Hilleman]. Starting from a kit car base — the Factory Five [...]

BAMF2010: SolarPump Charging Station

Posted: May 23rd, 2010, 12:39pm MDT by Phil Burgess

Amidst the noise of a bazillion robots and Tesla coils at the 2010 Bay Area Maker Faire, we located a bubble of usable WiFi, and got a nearby power charge to boot. If nothing else here, we want this: The SolarPump Charging Station is a self-contained oasis of free power for laptops, cel phones and [...]

Bay Area Maker Faire blasts off Saturday

Posted: May 21st, 2010, 3:36pm MDT by Phil Burgess

It’s crunch time at California’s San Mateo Event Center, where crews are busily assembling rocket ships, singing Tesla coils and animatronic giraffes and dragons in preparation for the 2010 Bay Area Maker Faire, taking place this weekend. Returning for its fifth year, Maker Faire, if you’ve not had the pleasure, could be described as 50 [...]

Human Tetris: object tracking on an 8-bit microcontroller

Posted: May 15th, 2010, 3:00pm MDT by Phil Burgess

Elaborating on an item previously mentioned among last weekend’s Cornell final projects list, this time with video: For their ECE final project, [Adam Papamarcos] and [Kerran Flanagan] implemented a real-time video object tracking system centered around an ATmega644 8-bit microcontroller. Their board ingests an NTSC video camera feed, samples frames at a coarse 39×60 pixel resolution (sufficient for simple [...]

Permalink for 'Hack_A_Day/2010/05/15/Hack_a_Day%e2%80%99s_Dictionary_of_Questionable_Utility%e2%84%a2'

Hack a Day’s Dictionary of Questionable Utility™

Posted: May 15th, 2010, 2:00pm MDT by Phil Burgess

We frequently receive inquiries from eager readers asking how they can best get started in electronics and computer projects. Countless great books have been written on these subjects, and of course now there’s our answers.hackaday.com site. But there’s a difference between being “book smart” and being “street smart.” What are the terms that you really need to know [...]

Minimalist AVR programmer is just fab!

Posted: May 15th, 2010, 1:00pm MDT by Phil Burgess

Whether you’re burning a new bootloader to an Arduino board, or doing away with a bootloader to flash Atmel chips directly, an in-system programmer (ISP) is an indispensable tool for working with AVR microcontrollers. If cost has held you back, it’s no longer an excuse: FabISP is a barebones USB-based AVR programmer that can be pieced together [...]

VirtualBox beta runs Mac OS X

Posted: May 3rd, 2010, 11:42am MDT by Phil Burgess

A new beta build of VirtualBox, Sun’s Oracle’s free x86 virtualization software, makes it possible to run Mac OS X as a guest operating system…no shenanigans or flaming hoops to jump through, just pop in the $30 retail Snow Leopard upgrade disc and go. This had previously only been possible with some awkward Hackintosh-style maneuvering, or [...]

Report from ESC Silicon Valley 2010

Posted: April 28th, 2010, 10:00am MDT by Phil Burgess

Ah, the heady aroma of damp engineers! It’s raining in Silicon Valley, where the 2010 Embedded Systems Conference is getting off the ground at San Jose’s McEnery Convention Center. ESC is primarily an industry event. In the past there’s been some lighter fare such as Parallax, Inc. representing the hobbyist market and giant robot giraffes [...]

Giant robotic giraffe getting a giant robotic facelift

Posted: April 13th, 2010, 7:31am MDT by Phil Burgess

If you’ve had the opportunity to attend the annual Bay Area Maker Faire, you’ve likely encountered Russell the Electric Giraffe. Modeled after a small Tamiya walking toy scaled up to the height of an actual giraffe, Russell was created by [Lindsay Lawlor] in 2005 originally as an “art car” providing a better vantage point from which to [...]

PCB drill press on a budget

Posted: March 18th, 2010, 8:09am MDT by Phil Burgess

An accurate drill press is an essential tool for making your own through-hole printed circuit boards at home. Reader [Josh Ashby] offers up a solid design using scrap bin materials. A major issue with PCB drilling is that even the slightest horizontal play will snap the delicate carbide drill bit. Hobbyist-grade tools such as Dremel’s drill [...]

Oscilloscope doubles as a serial terminal

Posted: February 24th, 2010, 5:10am MST by Phil Burgess

PC-based USB oscilloscopes are fast becoming all the rage. [Matt Sarnoff’s] Terminalscope takes the reverse approach, adapting an oscilloscope into a full serial terminal. You may have seen something similar before in the Dutchtronix/SparkFun O-Clock, but [Matt’s] project goes one further by adding a PS/2 keyboard port for full bidirectional serial communication, and with much sharper display resolution to boot. The [...]

Modded C64 eye candy

Posted: February 8th, 2010, 3:00pm MST by Phil Burgess

“Everyone needs a hobby,” they tell us. For the blogger mysteriously identified only as “R,” that hobby would be an almost fanatical nostalgia for the Commodore 64 computer. At first we thought this was a fan community site, but apparently it’s all the work of a single person. [R] has tweaked, extended, repackaged and resurfaced this 1980’s [...]

Altoids upstaged by gift card tins

Posted: February 7th, 2010, 6:41am MST by Phil Burgess

Nothing Earth-shattering here. Just, dare we say it, really cute! The venerable Altoids mint tin has become an icon of the maker culture. Browsing through past articles on Hack a Day, Adafruit or Instructables, you’ll find project after project for which these pocket-sized enclosures provided just the right fit. Eminently practical, affordable, but the aesthetics have occasionally left something [...]

Arduino shield for Arduino. No, really.

Posted: December 2nd, 2009, 7:07am MST by Phil Burgess

We’ve been accused on more than one occasion…okay, pretty much every single day…of harboring some kind of creepy Arduino love affair. The topic does come up an awful lot here, we’re not oblivious to that, and had been patiently waiting for April Fool’s Day to post an article lampooning the whole situation, both ourselves and critics alike, so that everybody [...]

Permalink for 'Hack_A_Day/2009/11/26/Tiny_keyboard_touchpad_has_%e2%80%9chack%e2%80%9d_written_all_over_it'

Tiny keyboard/touchpad has “hack” written all over it

Posted: November 26th, 2009, 8:52am MST by Phil Burgess

Yes, we know, this is not a hack, yet it just has the vibe of something we’ll likely be seeing in many small form-factor systems and wearable hacks in the future. The USB Wireless Handheld Keyboard is a diminutive keyboard and mouse replacement with a passing resemblance to a BlackBerry PDA — where the screen has [...]

Make any gloves work with a touch screen

Posted: November 25th, 2009, 3:06pm MST by Phil Burgess

The chill of autumn is upon us, and with it comes the awkward sport of trying to work touch-sensitive phones and gadgets with gloved fingers. One can try toughing it out with fingerless gloves, or we’ve seen some costly solutions in the forms of specialized gloves and capacitive-compatible styluses, but sometimes simple is best: all it [...]

STM8S-Discovery: Microcontrollers reach a new low

Posted: November 23rd, 2009, 2:30pm MST by Phil Burgess

A complete microcontroller development kit for little more than the cost of a bare chip? That’s what STMicroelectronics is promising with their STM8S-Discovery: seven dollars gets you not only a board-mounted 8-bit microcontroller with an decent range of GPIO pins and functions, but the USB programmer/debugger as well. The STM8S microcontroller is in a similar class as the [...]

Review: mbed NXP LPC1768 microcontroller

Posted: November 21st, 2009, 8:19am MST by Phil Burgess

mbed is a next-generation 32-bit microcontroller platform. It’s a prototyping and teaching tool somewhat along the lines of Arduino. On steroids. With claws and fangs. Other contenders in this class include the MAKE Controller, STM32 Primer and Primer 2, Freescale Tower, and Microchip’s PIC32 Starter Kit. The mbed hardware has a number of advantages (and a few disadvantages) [...]

DIYLILCNC: do-it-yourself CNC mill

Posted: November 13th, 2009, 6:03pm MST by Phil Burgess

The DIY LIL CNC project is the newest member of the homebrew fabrication scene. This is a three-axis CNC mill that can be built by anyone with basic shop skills and about $700 in their pocket. Many of the materials can be acquired from the likes of Home Depot: the basic framework is assembled from Masonite, while [...]

DIY circuit etching video tutorial

Posted: November 9th, 2009, 4:00pm MST by Phil Burgess

Circuit-bending blog GetLoFi has posted the best tutorial yet on home-made printed circuit boards using the toner transfer method. We’ve covered homebrew PCB fabrication techniques about a billion times before. What sets this tutorial apart is that it collects many bits of knowledge otherwise scattered all about the web, and then depicts the entire process on video, [...]

Permalink for 'Hack_A_Day/2009/10/30/Arduino_%e2%80%9cpython%e2%80%9d_integration'

Arduino “python” integration

Posted: October 30th, 2009, 10:00am MDT by Phil Burgess

[Cyberspice] informs us she likes snakes. Hey, who doesn’t? She’ll soon be adopting a lovely ball python and wanted to keep close tabs on the sensitive creature’s environment. To that end she assembled a network-enabled vivarium monitoring system based on Adafruit’s Boarduino (a minimalist Arduino clone), a TMP36 analog temperature sensor, Saelig’s WIZ810MJ Ethernet interface, and a common LCD screen. The [...]

Head-mounted computer with spit, bailing wire

Posted: October 27th, 2009, 9:00am MDT by Phil Burgess

Oh, for crying out loud! While we were all giddy reporting on yesterday’s wonderfully done head-mounted computer, [Andrew Lim] of recombu.com comes along and essentially does the same thing with an HTC Magic handset and three dollars worth of Harbor Freight crap. Linux kernel, WiFi, accelerometer, the whole nine yards. Consider our collective ass handed [...]

Head-mounted computer with Linux, WiFi

Posted: October 26th, 2009, 4:20pm MDT by Phil Burgess

Most wearable computers we’ve seen feature a head-mounted display tethered to a small PC system in a backpack or worn on a belt. Here’s a slick little system that does away with the cord, fitting the entire system in the glasses. [Pascal Brisset’s] WXHMD is based on the tiny Gumstix Overo Fire computer-on-module which features a beefy, 3D-capable OMAP [...]

Psystar taunts Apple a second time

Posted: October 23rd, 2009, 7:05am MDT by Phil Burgess

As if bankruptcy shenanigans and an unresolved exchange of lawsuits with Apple weren’t enough, Mac clone maker Psystar is really swatting the beehive now with the release of Rebel EFI, a $50 software package that promises a straightforward installation of Mac OS X on a variety of commodity x86 systems. Setting up one’s own “Hackintosh” system has traditionally [...]

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 [...]

Permalink for 'Hack_A_Day/2009/10/19/Dresser_tool_chest_isn%e2%80%99t_as_ghetto_as_you%e2%80%99d_think'

Dresser tool chest isn’t as ghetto as you’d think

Posted: October 19th, 2009, 3:00pm MDT by Phil Burgess

A dedicated rolling chest for one’s tools is among the most indulgent yet worthwhile acquisitions. Having everything mobile and organized for quick access improves efficiency and keeps the shop tidy. But holy living crap, have you priced these things? Even a mediocre setup costs more than the gross national product of some small nations! Here’s a project that tarts [...]

DSO nano oscilloscope reviewed

Posted: October 19th, 2009, 12:09pm MDT by Phil Burgess

We’ve been eyeing Seeed Studio’s DSO nano digital storage oscilloscope with a mix of intrigue and skepticism. A pocket-sized $89 storage ’scope? This is a joke, right? Hack a Day reader [Blair Thomson] has written a thorough review based on his experience with one of the beta test units, and it might be a winner [...]

Tying the knot with MakerBot

Posted: October 16th, 2009, 12:00pm MDT by Phil Burgess

De Beers would have you believe that only diamonds will do, but hackers are hardly ones to follow convention. How better to say “I love you” than with a MakerBot-extruded black ABS engagement ring? [Adam Elkins] did just that, creating the design with a combination of GIMP, SketchUp and Blender, then producing the final output on [...]

Permalink for 'Hack_A_Day/2009/10/16/RFID_enabled_robot%e2%80%a6mood%e2%80%a6tail%e2%80%a6thingy.'

RFID-enabled robot…mood…tail…thingy.

Posted: October 16th, 2009, 8:00am MDT by Phil Burgess

Furries: is there nothing they cannot do? Well okay, “shower” remains an elusive concept, but wearable technology seems to be in, as evidenced by this robotic mood tail. [Wei-Chieh Tseng]’s adorable Arduino-driven fashion accessory operates either via Wii Nunchuk or a set of RFID cards tagged with specific emotions to depict. Details are scant. It appears to have been a [...]

Online chip reference trims the fat

Posted: October 14th, 2009, 1:25pm MDT by Phil Burgess

Quick: which pins are used for I2C on an ATmega168 microcontroller? If you’re a true alpha geek you probably already know the answer. For the rest of us, ChipDB is the greatest thing since the resistor color code cheat sheet. It’s an online database of component pinouts: common Atmel microcontrollers, the peripheral ICs sold by SparkFun, and [...]

Daft Punk replica helmet

Posted: October 13th, 2009, 11:00am MDT by Phil Burgess

For all their varied and entertaining uses, circuits and code comprise only part of the complete hacking experience. To really put your project over the top, sooner or later you’ll want to possess some physical fabrication skills. Consider the works of [Ben Heckendorn]: He’s always done a fantastic job with the electronics, but it’s the fit and finish of [...]

DIY Dyson vac hack

Posted: October 13th, 2009, 8:00am MDT by Phil Burgess

[James Dyson] may have built eleventy billion prototypes to perfect his famous cyclonic vacuum, but sometimes just one will do the trick. A cyclonic separator is used in workshops to keep larger cruft out of the dust collection system. The airflow inside a separator creates a vortex that flings heavier bits and particles to the periphery [...]

Permalink for 'Hack_A_Day/2009/10/12/iTunes_LP__there%e2%80%99s_a_hack_for_that'

iTunes LP: there’s a hack for that

Posted: October 12th, 2009, 3:00pm MDT by Phil Burgess

One of the most-hyped features of iTunes version 9 is the addition of “iTunes LP,” which aims to recreate the classic record album experience with artwork and photos, lyrics, and liner notes — provided, of course, that you can pony up the purported $10,000 for production and you’re not one of those filthy indie labels. Almost [...]

Adding a keypad to a key card lock

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

[Colin Merkel] had a little problem: he was continually forgetting his electronic key card, locking himself out of his own dorm room. Like any normal Hack a Day reader, rather than getting in the habit of always carrying his card, the natural impulse of course is to build this elaborate rig of electronics and duct tape. Right? The result [...]

Beauty in Destruction

Posted: October 9th, 2009, 7:04am MDT by Phil Burgess

This is not a hack. In fact it’s a promotional montage for a collection of scientific equipment that few of us could likely afford. But like yesterday’s giant marionettes over Berlin, sometimes even a costly and delicately-orchestrated achievement transcends its own not-a-hack-ness, fulfilling our brains’ lust for wonderment all the same. Kurzzeit of Germany produces ballistics measurement equipment. The [...]

A modular Halloween with grid beam

Posted: October 8th, 2009, 1:41pm MDT by Phil Burgess

The fantastic Creatrope blog has a great article on quickly assembling animatronic Halloween gags using salvaged electric motors, pvc pipe, and “grid beam” construction. Grid beam is a prototyping and building medium that’s like a giant hippie Erector set. You can’t buy grid beam, but with a drill press, a jig, and some square stock you [...]

Software Auralization

Posted: October 8th, 2009, 7:20am MDT by Phil Burgess

Have you heard the latest track by gzip? Maybe it’ll end up on a “Greatest Hits” album alongside Philip Glass. Visualization techniques such as animated algorithms can help programmers better grasp the abstract theories that make software work. Could auralization, the sound equivalent of visualization, provide similar insights? Postgrad student (and J. S. Bach fan) [Cessu] developed a [...]

TV-B-Gone-zilla! Rar!

Posted: October 7th, 2009, 1:00pm MDT by Phil Burgess

TV-B-Gone: antisocial nuisance or harmless prank? Whatever your feelings, there’s no denying this device has become a staple of the DIY hacking crowd, as evidenced by the countless derivatives since hatched. This latest mutation crushes them all. [manekinen] from the Polish electronics blog Elektroda (“Electrode”) wasn’t satisfied with high-power TV-B-Gone designs using multiple 5mm infrared LEDs, so he [...]

TV hack bypasses HDCP

Posted: October 1st, 2009, 2:00pm MDT by Phil Burgess

Reader [GRitchie] wrote in with an interesting find in his new TV set: with just some minor soldering it was possible to tap into an unencrypted hi-def video stream. HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection), used by Blu-Ray players and cable or satellite receivers, normally ensures a DRM-protected link between the device and a compatible display. Any [...]

Build a Google-style panorama rig for $300

Posted: September 29th, 2009, 5:57pm MDT by Phil Burgess

As part of a “disruptive technologies” course at the United States Military Academy, [Roy D. Ragsdale] produced a working prototype of a Google Street View-like system called PhotoTrail. Like its corporate-backed inspiration, the system captures georeferenced 360-degree panoramas that can be viewed interactively in a web browser…but at a hardware cost of only around $300. [Ragsdale’s] [...]

Introduction to FTDI bitbang mode

Posted: September 22nd, 2009, 8:53am MDT by Phil Burgess

It was an interface that launched a thousand hacks. Near trivial to program, enough I/O lines for useful work, and sufficiently fast for a multitude of applications: homebrew logic analyzers, chip programmers, LCD interfaces and LED light shows, to name a few. Today the parallel printer port is on the brink of extinction (and good riddance, [...]

Virtual pool, real-world interface

Posted: September 21st, 2009, 5:00pm MDT by Phil Burgess

Sunday we saw robots playing pool and an augmented reality pool game. Today we’ll complete the pool trifecta: virtual pool using a real cue stick and ball in another vintage video from Hack a Day’s secret underground vault. The video is noteworthy for a couple of reasons: First is the year it was made: 1990. There’s been much buzz lately over real-world gaming [...]

Vintage Video: Computing Across America

Posted: September 18th, 2009, 7:32am MDT by Phil Burgess

in 1983, [Steve Roberts] packed up a Tandy 100 laptop and a 5-watt solar panel, fleeing suburbia on his recumbent bicycle on what would become a 17,000 mile journey that forever cemented his place in the geek pantheon…not just as a technology hacker, but as one of the preeminent “life hackers,” pursuing his own dreams [...]

Permalink for 'Hack_A_Day/2009/09/15/1_35_200_Scale_Train_is_World%e2%80%99s_Smallest'

1:35,200 Scale Train is World’s Smallest

Posted: September 15th, 2009, 2:00pm MDT by Phil Burgess

This train layout is so small it nearly defies photography as much as it defies expectations. Built by model railroad enthusiast [David Smith], this is a model of a model: an N scale (1:160) layout inside a Z scale (1:220) world! For size reference, the entire layout is shown under a ballpoint pen tip in the photo [...]

SparkFun kegerator goes to eleven

Posted: September 10th, 2009, 12:55pm MDT by Phil Burgess

It started with a simple need: keep tabs on SparkFun Electronics’ in-house kegerator so the beer won’t run out at inopportune times. But of course SparkFun and “simple need” make strange bedfellows…throw beer in the mix, and you know this can’t end well. The result, as you might imagine, reads like a who’s-who of electronics hackery buzzwords. Arduino? [...]

Permalink for 'Hack_A_Day/2009/09/07/C64_emulator_for_iPhone_approved_%e2%80%94_minus_BASIC'

C64 emulator for iPhone approved — minus BASIC

Posted: September 7th, 2009, 7:27am MDT by Phil Burgess

After a lengthy process that had previously met with rejection, Manomio’s Commodore 64 emulator for the iPhone and iPod touch has finally been accepted by Apple. This marks the first time a multi-purpose emulation title has been approved by the App Store. The $4.99 C64 app comes bundled with five fully-licensed classic games, and additional titles [...]

Toyaanisqatsi: time lapse control using LEGO parts

Posted: September 6th, 2009, 10:00am MDT by Phil Burgess

A simple panning motion can add impact to the already-dramatic effect of time lapse photography. To accomplish this, frugal cinematographers sometimes build [Rube Goldberg] contraptions from clock motors, VCR parts or telescope tracking mounts. Hack a Day reader [Stephan Martin] has assembled a clever bargain-basement system using an Arduino-driven stepper motor and a reduction gear system built up [...]

Direct-to-PCB inkjet printing

Posted: September 2nd, 2009, 6:45pm MDT by Phil Burgess

Full Spectrum Engineering has offered up a tutorial for their inkjet direct PCB kits that repurpose direct-to-CD capable inkjet printers (such as the Epson R280) to print etch-resistant ink straight onto copper clad board. This is easier and less error prone than some iron-on methods, especially for two-sided boards. Just print (no need to reverse the design), dry on [...]

Zelo, the Improbable Wooden Trike

Posted: September 1st, 2009, 2:40pm MDT by Phil Burgess

The earliest bicycles were made from wood. Nearly two centuries later, some garage tinkerers still turn to this most traditional of materials for their own creations, since welding one requires experience and tools beyond the reach of many. Resembling Gilligan’s Island props, the resulting bikes are both artistic and great fun, but not very practical for real [...]

DIY 3D gets a nod at SIGGRAPH

Posted: August 27th, 2009, 2:00pm MDT by Phil Burgess

Among the courses at this year’s SIGGRAPH (an annual technical conference and showcase of the latest in computer graphics research) was an introduction to 3D scanning that covers all the bases: mathematical foundations, two different build-your-own hardware approaches, and how to process and render the resulting datasets. The presenters have assembled all the course materials on a [...]

LEGO Mindstorms Sudoku Solver

Posted: August 24th, 2009, 8:30am MDT by Phil Burgess

Swedish hacker [Hans Andersson] is no stranger to puzzle-solving robots. His prior work, A Rubik’s cube-solving robot called Tilted Twister, made waves through the internet last year. [Hans’] latest project only has to work in two dimensions, but is no less clever. This new robot, built around the LEGO Mindstorms NXT system, “reads” a printed sudoku page, solves [...]

Humanoid Robot + Homebrew Waldo = Big Smiles

Posted: August 24th, 2009, 7:47am MDT by Phil Burgess

Robot enthusiast [Vitalijus Rodnovas] built this rig to allow a humanoid robot to mimic his own body movements in real time. [Rodonovas] refers to his man-machine interface as a “master-slave suit,” but elsewhere this is often called a waldo after a prescient 1942 [Robert Heinlein] novella. This project page is slight on details and is mostly written [...]

Maple beats up Arduino, takes its shields

Posted: August 22nd, 2009, 10:30am MDT by Phil Burgess

The Atmega168 at the heart of every Arduino is an eminently capable chip; its ilk have been seen working as a basic web server, playing back digital audio, even generating TV signals. But as projects continue to grow in sophistication, reality rears its ugly head: Arduino can handle any one of these tasks very well, but it [...]

Passive infrared (PIR) sensor tutorial

Posted: August 21st, 2009, 2:00pm MDT by Phil Burgess

[ladyada] has a freshly-published and amazingly thorough tutorial on passive infrared (PIR) motion sensors. Most often seen in security floodlights and automatic doors, in creative hands these sensors can be put to other uses—cat flaps, camera triggers and purely artistic applications—as you’ll see in several demo projects and videos. For the curious, the tutorial provides a good amount of [...]

Arduino USB host shield

Posted: August 21st, 2009, 10:57am MDT by Phil Burgess

Circuits@Home has been journaling their development of a USB host mode shield for Arduino, which could bring the platform a veritable explosion of mass storage, keyboard input and countless other peripheral options (and a corresponding raft of new hacks). Currently at the prototype stage, a ready-made shield and library are forthcoming, so keep checking back. Meanwhile, for embedded [...]