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Constant Current Dummy Load Project

# 2012-05-19 13:22:55, Hacked Gadgets - DIY Tech Blog
 

Name the Thing Contest – 204

# 2012-05-19 11:03:52, Hacked Gadgets - DIY Tech Blog
 

Making real-life portals with a Kinect

# 2012-05-19 09:01:19, Hack a Day
[radicade] wanted to know what real life portals would look like; not something out of a game, but actual blue and orange portals on his living room wall. Short of building a portal gun, the only option available to [radicade] was simulating a pair of portals with a Kinect and a projector. One of th...

DIY spring and plate reverb

# 2012-05-19 07:01:14, Hack a Day
If you’re running your own recording studio, you’re going to need a lot of gear that seems excessively esoteric to the non-musically inclined. A rack full of synth gear looks just like any other cabinet of technology you would find in a server room. Electronic music is, for the most part, very utilitarian looking, but [...]

Geeks living off the grid are hard on batteries

# 2012-05-19 05:01:35, Hack a Day
Many of you will remember [Mikey Sklar] from the multitude of times he’s been on hackaday. What you may not have noticed is that he is an ubergeek, living off the grid. He has Solar PV battery bank, three electric vehicles, a shipping container loaded with battery powered tools and a small army of...

Building a color sensor using luminosity

# 2012-05-19 03:01:07, Hack a Day
[Richard Osgood] is back again with an interesting project. This time he has constructed a color sensor. His initial design was to use three LEDs and a photoresistor. He would shine a red, then green, then blue LED on a surface and record the reflected light with the photoresistor allowing him to de...

Heavylift Hexacopter Build

# 2012-05-18 19:05:34, Hacked Gadgets - DIY Tech Blog
 

Reminder: SpaceX launch tomorrow. Watch it live!

# 2012-05-18 15:01:48, Hack a Day
There isn’t a hacker out there that isn’t interested at least a little bit in the prospect of building a mission specific rocket to explode someone off the face of the planet… without killing them. We got a tiny taste of what is coming when they let us watch their engine test a few weeks [...]

Conductive ink circuit experiments

# 2012-05-18 14:01:15, Hack a Day
This glowing LED is proof that the experiments [Nvermeer] is doing with conductive ink are working. We’re filing this one as a chemistry hack because  you need to hit the lab ahead of time in order to get the conductivity necessary for success. He reports that this technique uses a copper powder...

Scavenging from consumer electronics to make a flame-powered phone charger

# 2012-05-18 13:01:19, Hack a Day
[Gigafide] just finished building this flame-powered phone charger. The concept is not new. He grabbed a Peltier cooler and used the temperature differential between a flame and a heat sink to produce electricity used by the charger. If you search around here enough you’ll find plenty of candle-po...

Adding kilometers to a radio meant only for meters

# 2012-05-18 12:01:27, Hack a Day
The NRF 24L01+ radio transceiver can be found in a lot of wireless project builds. But it’s only meant to work at a range of a few meters. [Achu Wilson] found that he could greatly extend the range by as much as 2 kilometers. All he needed to do was build this high-gain antenna. He already [...]

Printing circuitry on a RepRap

# 2012-05-18 11:01:25, Hack a Day
Over on the RepRap blog, [Rhys] has been experimenting with molten metal to build circuits with the RepRap. Last June, [Rhys] found a neat alloy made of Tin, Bismuth, and a little bit of Indium that melts at around 130° C, and has just the right properties to be extruded with a standard RepRap setup. [...]

Teaching BeagleBone to play with LIDD displays

# 2012-05-18 10:01:22, Hack a Day
[Chris] hasn’t managed to get his hands on a Raspberry Pi yet, so he ordered a BeagleBone and got down to business. He was surprised to find that there isn’t much info out there about using LIDD type displays with the hardware. This protocol is used in many of the 320

How to build a competitive battle robot

# 2012-05-18 09:01:29, Hack a Day
Ever wonder what’s under the hood with a competitive battle robot like this one? It’s usually a big secret as teams don’t care to give their competition any help. But [AlexHrn] decided not only to give us a peek, but also shows us his step-by-step build process for Phoenix, the 30 pound flippi...

Accelerometer may help make you a sharpshooter

# 2012-05-18 08:01:16, Hack a Day
[Chris Suprock] is interested in using technology to improve your accuracy with a firearm. To that end, he’s using an Accelerometer mounted to a gun to gather feedback about each shot. The hardware setup is pretty simple. We don’t have specific details, but it looks like he’s using a QFN accel...

A new method for adding audio input to a Sansa Clip+

# 2012-05-18 07:01:11, Hack a Day
The Sansa Clip+ is a nice little MP3 player and recorder. But it doesn’t offer an input connector, instead relying on the built-in microphone. [Simon Frank] wanted to extend its functionality so he figured out how to add a standard audio jack for analog input. This is not the first time this has b...

SparkFun gets a Subpoena for all orders; says nah

# 2012-05-18 06:01:56, Hack a Day
It’s no secret that we’re fans of open source, and open hardware. And we have to applaud companies like SparkFun who also keep their customers in the loop about what’s going on with the business end of the company. For instance, they were recently contacted by a Sheriff’s office and asked fo...

Improvised weapons roundup

# 2012-05-18 05:12:09, Hack a Day
There’s something special about improvised weapons built for the upcoming zombie apocalypse. Whether it’s a Lousiville Decapitron or a shotgun revolver, we’re always fascinated by homemade weapons. Here’s a few that rolled into the tip line over the last few weeks: You call that a knife? [Joerg Sprave], a.k.a. that German guy ...

A color Maximite for glorious 3-bit BASIC

# 2012-05-18 04:01:34, Hack a Day
[Kilian] sent in a link to a color version of a tiny educational computer. It’s called the Quantumite and it’s designed to be a throwback to the early 80s microcomputers we all grew up on. The Quantumite is a clone of the Maximite, the tiny single board computer / BASIC interpreter designed by [...

A rocking and walking BEAM robot

# 2012-05-18 03:01:26, Hack a Day
We’ve seen a few minimalist robots in our time, but very few compare to [Thomas Rinsma]‘s amazingly agile BEAM robot. It’s absolutely fascinating to watch this little robot crawl around on its circular legs. BEAM robots are extremely simple robots built without a microcontroller of any ki...

Mixing colors on the Reprap

# 2012-05-18 02:01:42, Hack a Day
3d printing has come huge strides in ability to construct detailed objects. Unfortunately, color is still a considerable limitation. Here, some people at the Reprap blog are having fun coming up with an extruder head that actually mixes two colors as it deposits them. Don’t confuse this with the dual head that Makerbot is touting [...]

Hacking iPod headphone controller for use with Android

# 2012-05-18 01:01:20, Hack a Day
[Buddhra] wanted to use a set of ear buds that also had a controller built into the wire. The headset he chose to go with is meant for use with iPod, but he figured it should be possible to make it work with Android too. He was right, and managed to alter the controller for [...]

Light Trikes at the Bay Area Maker Faire

# 2012-05-17 19:15:16, Hacked Gadgets - DIY Tech Blog
 

3d printed nes portable looks fantastic and contains no hot glue

# 2012-05-17 14:01:45, Hack a Day
[Parker] emailed us today to show off his latest NES portable build. This time he’s using the standard “top loader” NES instead of the typically used NES on a chip. This is pretty cool since the NES on a chip has compatibility issues with some games. For the screen, he uses a common PSone scre...

Building sensors for the Scratch programming language

# 2012-05-17 13:01:15, Hack a Day
[Kevin Osborn] is making it a bit easier for young programmers to write programs that interact with the physical world. The device he’s holding in the picture is an Arduino based accelerometer and distance sensor meant for the Scratch language. Scratch is a programming language developed at MIT. ...

Retrotechtacular: Shakey shows off robotics innovation from 1972

# 2012-05-17 12:01:10, Hack a Day
In this installement of Retrotechtacular we’re taking a look at Shakey, a robot developed between 1966 and 1972 at the Stanford Reserach Lab. This was a glorious time when students had long hair but still wore long sleeves and ties to do their research. The robot is actually communicating wireless...

Giving a Powerpoint presentation with an Apple ][

# 2012-05-17 11:01:58, Hack a Day
When [Vince] saw a coworker give a presentation with an iPad, he thought to himself what a tremendous waste of computing resources he was witnessing; an iPad is just as powerful as an early Cray supercomputer, and displaying slides isn’t a computationally intensive task. We’re assuming [Vince]�...

Cheap wooden hexapod frame greatly reduces cost

# 2012-05-17 10:01:56, Hack a Day
[Balline] really wanted to play with a hexapod but found the cost to be prohibitive. Being a mechanical engineer, he was able to fairly quickly come up with a stable 3 servo design that would allow him to experiment with the platform. He chose to use wood as the construction material to help reduce ...

Electric Imp connects projects to the Internet

# 2012-05-17 09:01:16, Hack a Day
If you’re planning a build that communicates wirelessly to that ‘Internet of things’ we’ve been hearing about, you might want to check out the Electric Imp. This tiny little card connects your project to the Internet without all the hassle of configuring an embedded wireless device. Inside t...

Snake-like robot can roll around in a ring

# 2012-05-17 08:01:14, Hack a Day
A lot of 3D printing and a many servo motors went into this snake-like robot, and it’s only about half of what [Toby Baumgartner] plans to accomplish. In this orientation the snake is rolled into a circle, and apparently some special movements in the segments allow it to roll around like this. He ...