If I had one of these Animatronic Eye Mechanisms I could put it to good use this Halloween. |
Mental note, don’t short out bus bars. π |
If you can get your hands on a Rand McNally GPS this Rand McNally GPS Hack will show you how to get the serial data out of it. Since these GPS devices are quite old now they should be quite cheap. Does anyone know of a cheaper serial GPS solution? If so please share it with me. π |
If you are wanting to add some bass to your home theater why build a Huge Rubik’s Cube Subwoofer! It isn’t as big as this gigantic subwoofer but it looks a lot more fun.
"Sealed Enclosure: 3 Cu. Feet Driver Diameter: 15", Aluminum Cone Outer Enclosure: 3/4" MDF Shell with 3/4" MDF ’tiles’ overlaying it, forming the Rubik’s Squares Reinforcement: 1 Y/Z-Axis piece of 3/4" MDF, cut to allow driver. 1 X/Y-Axis piece of 3/4" MDF, cut to allow driver and Plate Amp. 1 Z-Axis piece of 3/4" MDF, cut to allow Driver. 1 full piece of 1/2" MDF at top. 1 Cut piece of 3/4" MDF on bottom. Total Box measurements: 20.75" Wide, 20.75" Tall, 20.75" Long Tile size: Face: 7.5" X 7.5", Cube: 7.5" X 7.5" X 7.5" Total Measurements: 22.5" Wide, 25.5" Tall (w/ 3" feet), 22.5" Long Total Weight w/o Speaker, wiring, Poly-fil, Amplifier: ~98 lbs. Total Weight: ~144 lbs. It’s a beast, I must say, but before we begin how about some background information? My current system utilizes 2 Paradigm v3.0 Studio 100s (fronts), 1 CC-590 center, and 2 Studio 20s for 5.1 surrounds. Driving all that is an NAD T773, biamped with 2 NAD C272s for the fronts and discrete 7.1 inputs biamping the 20s – Long live the Canadian sound! Likewise, when I finally moved into my new apartment with space for a television (that’s a luxury in Boston) I wanted the extra kick for DVDs – what HT is complete without a sub? I’ll admit I’m a bit of a purest and can’t stomach the thought of attaching an external sub to my stereo so my search began for something that could rock the 60hz range in movies but neither force me to rewire every time I want to play a CD… Being a huge fan of my Paradigms, I naturally went to the accompanying model for my Studio 100s – the Direct Servo 15. Despite making a great sub, I also played around with the option I eventually went with – making one. Reasons for this were two-fold – I hadn’t taken on any art pieces in a while and just having dropped first, last, security, etc for the new place I didn’t want to make a large purchase (insert your Alanis Joke here). Long story short, I chose to go with a Rythmik Audio Servo-15. One visit to Rythmik Audio’s website and you can see that these guys aren’t messing around. " Thanks Reverend Jones
|
If you have ever wanted to play with some fiber optics here is a Fiber Optic LED Rose Project that you could try out. Nice to see some of my LEDs were used to make a cool project! Optional:
|
Matt Denton of MicroMagic Systems specializes in animatronics for the film industry. Check out the very interesting (creepy) face tracking robot called i.c Hexapod. A bit of technical background: i.C. has an on board processor I have developed called the p.Brain, this takes care of all body leg and body locomotion. The p.Brain runs on a PIC ds33F processor. There is an off board Windows XP Mini-ITX based PC with a Pentium M 1.73Ghz processor which takes care of the face recognition and tracking. This PC is connected to the p.Brain via a serial link. Only simple commands such as X,Y and Z rotation of the head and body are sent to the p.Brain from the PC. This means that if the PC crashes (which they so often do!) The p.Brain will put i.C to sleep without damaging any of the servos. There are 21 servos on i.C. hexapod. 3 degrees of freedom for each leg, 2 for head pan and tilt, and one which acts as a blink shutter for the main lens. i.C. blinks when a picture has been taken, pictures are stored locally with the time data and location they were taken, and also uploaded to a server for his website (still under development).” |
Have a look at this cool PIC 12F683 Microcontroller Based Logic Probe. First, this device determine if the wire is floating, this is done by applying a weak current into it with a pin on the microcontroller and see if the state changes, and draw a weak current from it using the pin and see if it changes. The current is weakened by the 10k resistor attached to the pin, commonly called a pull up or pull down resistor if used for this purpose (overriding the state of a floating wire). If the state changes, it means the wire is floating, and the device indicate that using a LED. If itβs not floating, then the voltage on the wire should indicate a logic high or low, and the device indicate that using another LED.” |