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Sending a balloon into near space has been done quite a few times by the BEAR group in Alberta Canada. Have a look at the details of their 4th launch where Tomoya Kamiko from Japan came to Canada with his HD camera to take it into space! "The balloon and camera were launched at 7:44 AM, the balloon burst at 10:51 AM at 107,145 ft. and the camera landed via parachute at 11:40 AM, 89 miles from the launch site after a 3 hr. & 56 min. flight. At 5:45 the camera is nearing 107,145 ft. where there’s basically no air to conduct sound so nothing is heard other then what vibrations are conducted through the supporting cords, Styrofoam box and camera body to the camera microphone, like the bursting of the balloon at 6:26. Some of the balloon remains can be seen falling past the lens at 6:27 and then the fun begins as the Styrofoam box with the camera inside is repeatedly struck by the antenna hanging below it and several pounds of latex remaining from the burst balloon as everything tumbles every which way back to earth in the near vacuum at up to 7900 ft./min (90 mph) until there’s enough atmosphere for the parachute to start functioning."
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Mark Argo put on a great Ignite talk at Ignite Toronto about our DIY environment. "Since the dawn of humanity we have fashioned objects to help extend our basic capabilities: see better, walk farther, speak louder, soar higher. More than ever we depend on these ‘gadgets’ to navigate our environment and culture. ‘Adapting With Technology’ explores the origins of modern gadgetry and looks towards their future role as personal technologies." |
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Openschemes shows us how those $10 USB to RS232 adapters can be hacked to provide us a valuable tool. Nice thing about soldering some wires to a few test points on a finished circuit is that the circuit can be put away for use in the future. That never happens to a circuit that was built on a bread board since it will probably be ripped out to make room for another circuit before the original one is needed. "The most desirable type of adapter uses at least two chips: a USB controller chip such as a microcontroller and a level translator chip such as a MAX232. Other types can be hacked but they will probably need you to dump the firmware, rewrite it, and reprogram the device. That’s fun and all, but for now we’re just looking for a simple and CHEAP way to get a low-voltage USB serial port." |
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This Arduino GPS Game that won the Let Arduino Play contest over at Brico Geek looks like fun. Unlike normal games where you simply interact within the imaginary game space this one uses GPS to bring the game play into the real world. If someone would like to provide a few sentences that describe the game a bit better I would love to publish that. ADDED Sept 23 – Thanks for the interpretation. The aim of the game is to get the ball (small black dot) into the exit box (Big black box). This is done using the real world position of the player through GPS. An arrow on the display shows the direction the player is facing in the game space in reaction to the GPS data the game reads and the small ‘x’ on screen act as a marker for the player’s position which also changes in reaction to GPS data. The ball bounces around the screen, to bounce it into the box the player can draw lines on screen by pressing the ‘ok’ button to start a line, walking the required distance and direction, then pushing ‘ok’ to end the line. These will act as new surfaces for the ball to bounce off.
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Before you say this LED Controller doesn’t look micro, have a look at the board in the picture below with a 9 volt battery snap to compare it to. This board is tiny! You could hide this thing in model cars, train sets, props, this list goes on an on. Also the interface is a single button, it doesn’t get much simpler than that. Via: HG Forum
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Steve Hoefer has completed version 2 of his Dice Reading project (Version 1 can be found here). I was surprised to see that only 5 locations of the dice are looked at to determine what number is present since there are actually nine locations where the pips could be located. It obviously works but for some reason isn’t obvious to me at this moment! "This version uses 5 IR emitter/receiver pairs to read five of the nine potential pip locations on a die face. I had to file down the edges of the detectors to get them pip-distance apart and place the emitters directly behind the detectors so they’d get maximum reflection from the surface" |
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Thanks to the Ohm’s Law Calculator Website for sponsoring the contest this week. They will be providing a useful Resistor Color Chart Mug to the winner. The site provides an Ohm’s Law Calculator, Ohm’s Law Wheel, E24 Resistor Sizes, Resistor Color Chart, LED Resistor Calculator, AWG Wire Sizes and mcd to Lumens Converterinformation. This site is sure to be useful when you are designing your next circuit, might even be a good idea to bookmark the site now instead of hunting for it when you need it! This contest will run for one week (Sept 19 – 25, 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 winner will be chosen at random from all of the correct entries. ———————————–———- Added October 7, 2009 The item to guess was the Slide-Type Wire-Wound Power Resistors The winner is Will K. (There were 187 entries) ————————————–———- Below is a picture of the the prize product.
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