Maxi Huber sent in this HD projector build that he documented in a Youtube video. He purchased the kit from a German company. Looks like a cool project.

"The benefits from this projector are: The price is very cheap (499€) for an HD projector with DVI, HDMI (Playstation3 is working via HDMI!), S-VHS and many other conectors! The fans are very silent and the lamp costs just 20€ so the projector can run 24/7 without ever getting poor! I had a lot of fun assembling this product and painting it according to the colour of my home cinema! And the result is just amazing: it has a great, great HD picture and the assembling is really easy and can be done by everybody! Even if the manual at the website is not english, it is not a problem to understand it because it consists mainly out of pictures…!"

I need one of these robots to make me some coffee in the morning! Even though I a sure there was lots of prep prior to each mini scene this robot is actually very strong and flexible!

Thanks for sending it in Alex.

Roller skating got taken over by roller blading, what technology is next? Have a look at the next generation of wheels that can be attached to your feet and take your pick. They all look very interesting but I wonder how hard they are to use?

When working with a microcontroller there are never enough pins to do the job. Sure you can move up to a hundred pin microcontroller and call it a day but you will have to pay a huge price for that chip, instead it is generally better to pass off the IO complexity to another chip. In this project Oscar uses the Micrel MM5450 is doing the heavy lifting when it comes to controlling the individual pixels of the 8X8 matrix.

"I have used an Arduino Nano board with a LED 8×8 Matrix to show a simple text scroller."

Instead of spending big bucks on one of those high power RC car motors Rabbithazen was thinking outside the box and used a Ryobi drill motor in his RC car. It wouldn’t make sense to go and buy a new drill just to harvest the motor but there are lots of ways to pick these up cheap. For example, most cities have a warranty depot where non-repairable drills with perfectly good motors are going into the trash.

"Here is my e-revo recently i tore apart my brand new 18V Ryobi drill. it was a direct bolt-on to the motor plate. i am running two 7cell NIMH packs. This motor does crazy wheelies with 3/4 throttle, full it lifts the back wheels off the ground onto its wing. after a full run this motor barely gets warm. It’s almost still room temp."

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The prize this week will provide you lots of rubber band fun, it needs a few servos to make it real fun though. This week we have an old piece of equipment which might be hard to identify, lets see if anyone can identify it! This contest will run for one week (June 27 - July 2, 2009) . Ending time is based on central standard time. To enter, identify the item pictured above and give an example of what can be done with it.

Please do not give the answer in the comments. 

Send an email to contest @ hackedgadgets.com with "Name the Thing Contest" as the subject, and the message body consisting of:

• The name of the item in the above picture
• An example of what the item pictured above can be used for

The winner will be chosen at random from all of the correct entries.

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Added July 11, 2009

The item to guess was a AVO model 2 signal generator

The winner is Alban K. (There were 28 entries)

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Below is a picture of the the prize product.

ElectronicsNerd shows us how to reverse engineer an IR remote control signal. By understanding what type of signal is being transmitted out of the remote control allows a microcontroller to simulate the code to control the Hampton Bay Air Conditioner.

"In the NEC protocol, the initial start pulse prepares the receiver IC for a data transmission at a particular rate, adjusting its AGC circuitry for the signal level excursions of what is to follow. After the standard 9ms equalization pulse, there’s a 4.5ms pause, and the receiver then accepts data at a predefined baud rate. If one weird spike were to occur at a particular moment during the transmission, the air conditioner might turn off instead of lower the setpoint temperature of the unit, without a means for detecting glitches in a transmission. Simple error checking like this provides for disallowing invalid input, while providing near-failsafe transmission of valid control data."