[Dave] wanted to show off a project at his 4th-grade son’s school during their family science night. We haven’t heard of an event like this before but it sounds like a fabulous idea! He had a new laser he wanted to include in the project, and noticed that his son was learning about ho...
The business end of the bending tool is the red-hot Nichrome wire running through the aluminum channel. That channel is used to protect the MDF and act as a spacer so that the wire doesn’t touch the acrylic. On the near side the wire is anchored with a screw, but on the far end it is ...
Perhaps type acceptance would be an issue. As hams the FCC does allow us to build or modify our own devices but we aren’t allowed to market them without type acceptance. I’m thinking you would have to take a two-micro approach. One controls the transmit vfo/power while the other is th...
The 2013 Uzebox Coding Challenge is currently underway. This competition runs until June 1st, with registration open until April 1st. The Uzebox is an open source, 8 bit game console that uses only two chips: an ATmega644 microcontroller and a AD725 RGB to NTSC converter. We’ve featur...
We understand where [John Clarke Mills] is coming from when he says he wants a home theater but not at the expense of dedicating a room to it. His situation is a bit more sticky than most folks in that he has a beautifully kept Victorian era home. Recently he was removing a renovation...
Why do many people think everything posted to hack a day has to be a market ready product, ready for shipping with a defined ROI and small business plan for people to enjoy it or that they need to step in and validate the usefulness based of a project based on a narrow world view to b...
a 3D printed Hemispherical Omnidirectional Gimballed Drive system which you can make at home . That’s a mouthful which is why it is commonly referred to as a HOG drive. Never heard of one? Well you need to keep up with your Hackaday because about 20 months ago we featured this amazing...
This tie turned VU meter has us asking: Will anyone be able to look you in the eye during a conversation? It uses an integrated microphone and microcontroller to make a single-column display made of RGB LEDs move to ambient sound. It shouldn’t be hard to guess that this project is ano...
Here’s a design that lets you make acrylic enclosures without using fasteners . The red outline in the diagram above is a bit hard to make out. But look closely and you’ll realize that there is very little material which has been removed to form the clip. This uses the rigidity/flexib...
As for why [Dan] would want an AVR to build an interpreter for a language that is nearly unreadable by humans, we honestly have no idea other than the common, ‘because it’s there’ sentiment. There are some pretty cool projects out there that use brainfuck, including this genetic algor...
I ultimately decided I would get a very fast and small radio controlled car to use as a platform, and I would use the guts of the Intruder as the spy portion. This worked very well. Then, I took a trip to one of the nicer hobby stores in town, Hobby Town . I explained my project and t...
Some people see 3D printers as expensive and slow devices for replicating bracelets, whistles, and Yoda heads. Until the world transitions to a plastic octopus-based economy, those of us with 3D printers will have to find something useful for these tools. Bayesian Empiritheurgy out of...
Thank you for your comments! Well, Kiwi isn’t about building the coolest homebrew computer. Kiwi is about having fun tinkering around and fulfilling a dream I had as a child in the 1980ies (as agtrier said). I hope we have passed the system-war-times. “Amiga is cooler than Atari or vi...
Actually the prop arc is kind of small, so sticking random body parts in it is not what most worries me. What most worries me is that it’s a wooden propeller, which have been known to splinter, and fracture and throw a sharp stake out at high velocity. In it’s intended use on a model ...
You can read his back story at the link above. He had the chance to enter a 4-digit pin before the format process. Now that he’s wiped the drive the code is at least 6 characters long, which is a lot more possibilities (at least it’s numeric characters only!). To automate the process ...
Your hands do a lot of work between the keyboard and the mouse, why the heck are you letting your feet be so lazy? [Dossier van D.] is putting an end to the podiatric sloth. He built this set of three foot pedals which have gone through two versions of functionality. The buttons thems...
The creator of this project started off with a 7″ tablet he received from a coworker. The screen was horribly smashed from one corner spreading out through the entire surface. But the hardware inside still worked, including the HDMI out port. He ended up transplanting the tablet hardw...
[Navin] has been hard at work producing a GUI which works with different micocontrollers . The idea is to make it even easier to develop projects by simplifying the feedback and control you can get from the prototyping hardware. The best part about it is that he designed the software ...
Apartment dwellers who are living the nomadic lifestyle take note. You don’t need to live your tinkering lifestyle out of a toolbox. Here is a great example of a respectable electronics bench which breaks down when it’s time to move (translated ). We’re sure you already belong to your...
The 1980s were a heyday for strange computer architectures; instead of the von Newmann architecture you’d find in one of today’s desktop computers or the Harvard architecture of a microcontroller, a lot of companies experimented with strange parallel designs. While not used much today...
One thing that’s really convenient for custom Eagle parts is that most components are DIPs or some sort of leaded SMD component. [Dave]‘s script takes the dimensional data from any chip’s datasheet and creates a custom outline for each part. The inputs and outputs can also be ripped d...
Beware that smoothing 3D printed parts with a solvent is PATENTED, just like many other OBVIOUS little things you can do while making 3D printed parts also have been granted ridiculous patents. Some obvious examples are: 1) Keeping your 3D printer at a warm temperature in a temperatur...
[Douglas Adams] will tell you not to forget your towel when it comes to space travel. But NASA may start mandating that astronauts always carry a toothbrush. That’s because when a recent repair on a critical International Space Station component went wrong it was a toothbrush hack tha...
Many of the parts come from a washing machine that the team scrapped for the build — most notably the motor which drives the belt. But pretty much every part of it is salvaged. For instance, the conveyor belt that transports the full glasses was made from gluing sections of bicycle in...
At first we thought that [Pete Prodoehl] was using the wrong term when calling his project a Laser Kaleidoscope . We usually think of a kaleidoscope as a long tube with three mirrors and some beads or glass shards in one end. But we looked it up and there’s a second definition that me...
[Art Barrios] kept having night-time visitors who were raiding his dog’s food storage bin. It’s a plastic tub with a lid that latches but the critters were knocking it over and popping that lid off. He wanted to find out which animal was the culprit so he hacked together an automatic ...
We love the concept of using an LCD screen to transfer data. The most wide-spread and successful method we know of is the combination of a QR code and the camera on a smart phone. But for less powerful/costly devices data can be transferred simply by flashing colors on the screen. Tha...
The Raspberry Pi is great if you’re looking for a cheap yet powerful computer running Linux, but let’s not forget all the other ARM dev boards out there. [Adam] spent some time this weekend putting together an Ubuntu distro for his Beagleboard XM to give it the convenience of a GUI an...
The migraine-inducing image above is the product of [Rupert Hirst]‘s attempts at home PCB fabrication. He’s using the toner transfer method – printing a circuit on a piece of transparency sheet with a laser printer, setting it on a piece of copper clad board, and sending the whole ass...
Building RGB LED displays is one of the most interesting programming and engineering challenges we see here on Hackaday. Not only do the creators of large displays and LED cubes have to deal with the power requirements of driving a whole bunch of LEDs, but there’s also the issue of ge...
