The Halloween Hanging Mobile Project was lots of fun. Hand drawn images were cut out using a Fireball V90 CNC machine as pieces of the spooky mobile. You can see more details of the V90 CNC machine here.

Here are the basic steps of what was done:

• Drawings were made on sheets of paper
• The drawings were scanned into the computer and touched up using MS Paint
• Artcam was used to convert the bitmap images into vectors
• The vectors were used to create tool-paths so that the images could eventually be cut out
• The tool-paths were exported to G code for the CNC computer
• The CNC computer controlled the CNC machine to allow the parts to be cut out in exact proportion
• Paint all the pieces
• Tie them together with fishing line
• Hang and enjoy!

 You will notice below that the CNC machine has a Bosch Colt router installed, this router has a 1/4 inch collet. The issue here is small bits such as the 3mm single flute bit that needs to be used here would not fit directly into the router. MCPi has developed a Dremel Chuck Adapter for a 1/4 inch collet. With this installed tiny bits are no longer an issue.

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The goal of Gyrowheel might be to enable our children to learn how to ride a bike as well as MURATA BOY. The Gyrowheel will probably not spell the end to normal training wheels because of the increased complexity and therefore cost. But it certainly has many advantages over conventional training wheels so I would not be surprised to see it come as standard equipment on small bikes in the near future.
Via: Dvice

"Gyrowheel, revolutionizes how children can learn to ride a bike and renders training wheels obsolete. Gyrowheel senses unbalanced biking and re-centers the bike underneath the rider’s weight at the point when tipping starts to occur. With Gyrowheel, riders experience a faster, safer, easier and more fun way to learn to ride a bike."

In the video the Spooky Dropper is setup to deliver a bat right in front of the victim. It could drop a spider, ghost, rat or anything else you can dream up! It can reset itself automatically using one normal servo and one that has been modified for continuous operation. This is begging to be hooked up to a motion detector or even the door bell circuit to launch at just the right time. To see the full documentation of Vern Graner’s project have a look at the Halloween edition of Nuts and Volts Magazine.

If you have a Halloween project of your own, why not add it to the list of projects in the Show us your Halloween Project Contest.

Remember Carl that made the Spinning RGB LED Ball Display? He has also built a wicked RGV Laser System! I can just imagine using this at the center of a big party. You would have to pass out eye protection though.

"Three laser beams in primary red, green and violet are combined with the optics harvested from an HD-DVD drive to make white. The total output is 350-400mW, and wavelengths are 660, 532 and 405nm. The homemade TTL constant current driver modulates the lasers to simulate over 16 million colours from an ordinary RGB LED-circuit with PWM, amplified by transistors."

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Guitar Hero is very popular these days but like any piece of equipment that gets tons of use it will break or wear out. The basic warranty is only 90 days so fixing it yourself will become necessary in many situations. Have a look at the Guitar Hero DIY Repair Guides from the guys at 5FRETS for some great tips.

"Unfortunately, the Guitar Hero World Tour guitar has notoriously unreliable and failure-prone strumbar switches – sometimes failing right out of box! I bought mine during the October 2008 midnight release and it lasted about 4 months before it started doublestrumming on its own. At first I noticed the menu jumping two songs when I only clicked one, and shortly afterwards it ruined my gameplay."

I shudder at the thought of soldering up this Surface Mount LED Array from bear24rw. Have a look at the build, the circuit board was designed and etched by hand and the picture documentation is very good. These are the same guys that made the RFID Doorm Room Unlocker.

Thanks Max.

"The driver we choose to design was highly inspired from this one. The basic idea is that you use shift registers to sink the columns and a line driver of some sort to source the rows (we chose to use a Darlington array).

There where a lot of changes from the Instructables design that that we had to make however. The matrix in the Instructables was a lot smaller than ours and used 8 IO lines to drive each row. Since our matrix has 16 rows this was completely infeasible using just an ATMega168. To solve this issue we choose to use a 4:16 de-mux to control all sixteen rows with only 4 IO pins."

Gadget Gangster has a new project called the Simple Servo Tester. It allows you to plug in up to two servo motors and test them with a simply turn of a dial. You can purchase the project in kit for here if you are interested in adding this to your test equipment.

"A little bigger than a postage stamp, the Simple Servo Tester lets you control two digital or analog servos without using a transmitter or receiver, just plug in your battery pack to start testing. Use it to check your servos before installing them into your models or to center your servos when setting up linkages. The Simple Servo Tester can also be tuned to precisely center your servos – Some manufactures consider 1.520 milliseconds to be center while others use 1.500 milliseconds. Use it anytime you want to operate a servo but don’t want to get out your RC equipment!"