James Burton from XRobots.co.uk has sent in the latest progress on his Bipedal Dynamic Stability Testing. Looks to be moving along very well.

“It’s about half the height of an average person and I built all the parts from scratch with hand tools. It’s basically intended as a development platform so I have some more to build and some more experiments to do, but I’m at the stage where I have dynamically stable walking using R/C style heading gyros intended for use with R/C helicopters. The whole thing is currently controlled with a single Picaxe-18X micro controller.”

If you ever wanted a way to control your night light from across the room you are in luck. Dan reverse engineered his Ikea night light and stuffed in a bunch of electronics so that it can now be controlled by an Android Phone. Of course remote control is just the beginning, a smart Android app could now easily use it to display the status of many things.

“It’s about a simple idea: take a cheap 3 colours Ikea night lamp, hack it by replacing its original MCU and adding a cheap serial bluetooth device and then write a simple Android app to control the lamp remotely from your phone !

This is just the beginning, imagine the possibilities once the phone has direct control over the colours and their respective intensities. You can make it light up in sync with some music, you can make it change colours depending on some e-mails you receive or your Facebook status, etc. …”

Reclaimed wood was used to replace the stair treads in this stairwell but the knot holes were coming out. Broken glass and epoxy was used to fill the knot holes, a bunch of LED were added to let the knot holes light up. A motion sensor is used to light the stairs for 9 seconds which is just enough time to enjoy the look of the cool knot holes as you walk up the stairs.

Via: Stair Lighting Blog

“Foot lights on our stairway are epoxy pools of glass in the knot holes. They are triggered by a light motion sensor modified to drive a solid state relay which in turn switches a Dell power supply driving 11.5 V to approximately 35 LED lights.”

Viktor has built a great looking project which is a PIC Microntroller based Dual Thermometer using two DS1820 1-Wire Sensors. This allows Viktor to monitor the exact temperature in his fridge and freezer at the same time. Since the sensors are 1-wire this means that they are really easy to wire to the board.

“The temperature sensing part I used for this project is a high-precision 1-Wire digital thermometer chip from Dallas Semiconductors. There are a number of similar ones available; I used the DS1820 because I have a few of them left over from previous projects. This one uses the 1-Wire protocol to communicate with the PIC, doesn’t need any external components and it’s easy to be placed inside a fridge.”

 When I was living the cubicle like it sometimes seemed what time either flew by or slowed to a crawl. This Capricious Clock by our friend Pete Mills makes the second hand move in some strange ways which makes it makes the seconds tick by the way time sometimes feels.

 ”The code keeps track of the 1pps pulses coming from the quartz clock movement, it delays for a random period of time then moves the second hand.  If the “Real Time” elapsed is greater than the displayed time the program will delay anywhere from 1-0.125s to catch up to the “Real Time”.  If the display time is faster, the program will select a random time from 1-8s to slow down so that “Real Time” can catch up.”

Dave Molmen has sent in the picture build log of his custom Exuberant Clock. The clock concept is very interesting. The center of the clock slowly rotates, to read the time all you need to do is see which slot the brass circle is in, this is the hour representation and what minute indication it is beside. The clock face moves the brass indicator across the minute number one per minute and when the full hour has expired the clock advances to allow the time indicator to slide into the next hour indication. Thanks to Dave for turning to the Gear Clock kit electronics as the base electronics controller for this clock. Since this clock doesn’t operate in the same way the Gear Clock did some custom firmware was needed. 

Viktor sent in a great tutorial on How to Fix a Worn out Video Game Controller. Most remote controls use rubber membranes that have conductive end that press against the circuit board when pushed. The circuit board has some gold fingers that get shorted out to register the button press. Viktor uses some metal foil on the rubber membrane to bring the controller back to life. This trick should work fine for devices like your XBOX, Playstation, Wii and  TV remotes.