Is there anything that can’t be made out of LEGO? After seeing this I am thinking the answer is NO.

“One day I was making a simple little elastic gun to shoot Lego blocks and I thought to myself, ‘it would be cooler if it had some kind of trigger.’ The next thing I knew, I was involved in a competition with my own self”

Via: TechEBlog

If space is at a premium and your budget is small, this computer is tiny and cheap!

“The CM-X270 is a small Computer-on-Module board designed to serve as a building block in embedded applications. The CM-X270W has all the components required to run operating systems such as Linux and Windows CE. Ready packages for these operating systems are available from CompuLab.

The small size and low power consumption of the CM-X270 allows its integration into hand-held and mobile applications, while its low price makes it an ideal selection for cost-sensitive applications. Based on Intel’s XScale architecture, the CM-X270 delivers a price/performance ratio significantly better than that of any other platform.”

Via: The Inquirer

You have seen propeller clocks before, but what about a Nixie Propeller Clock? I didn’t think so! Check out the link for code and a schematic.

“I stuffed the board with the PIC, the crystal oscillator, two logic chips, 10 HV transistors, the nixie, the HV inverter from a disposable camera flash circuit, the 7805 5V regulator, a 0.6 Farad memory cap, diodes, and the pushbuttons for setting the time. Rather than taking apart the motor to obtain power from the armature for the spinning board, I ripped apart another cheap motor and pulled out the armature and brush contacts and put it on the outside shaft of the other motor. The shaft was long enough for the armature and the cylinder that holds the spinning board.”

Via: Make

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Got a RC chopper, why not take a camera into the sky for some aerial pictures?

“Here’s a 3.4 I picked today. I sliced off the battery compartment and installed a servo plug so the camera can be powered by my plane/helicopters receiver. Works great. The 3 wires you see are from a servo extender, I’m not using the yellow (signal) wire…just the black and orange power ones. While it’d be cool to remotely start recording, with 20 minutes of 320 x 240 and video editing software it wasn’t a priority right now. If I decide to up it to 640 x 480 it might be something to thing about.”

It would be fun to program this to fall over when it is time for a coffee break.

“Availabot is a physical representation of presence in Instant Messenger applications. Availabot plugs into your computer by USB, stands to attention when your chat buddy comes online, and falls down when they go away. It’s a presence-aware, peripheral-vision USB toy… and because the puppets are made in small numbers on a rapid-prototyping machine, it can look just like you.”

Via: TechEBlog

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If you have a Roomba, why not buy a broom and put the Roomba to better use.

“The other day I was marveling at the efficient operation of my roomba when it occurred to me that it would be really nice if roomba would get me a beer. While gestating the idea my first thought was to have roomba follow a line to the fridge and back. And a short while after that I realized that roomba already had 4 downward facing optical sensors AKA the cliff sensors. I decided to hack them up and make them sense light/dark lines instead of cliff/no cliff. I haven’t actually made the roomba get me a beer yet, I’m thinking of using a PIC to interface the roomba serially, and a 4066 switch IC to change between normal and beer retrival modes. Anyway I’ve shown here how to hack up your sensors as a first step. Enjoy!”

Via: Hackaday