|
Brett Dickins has uploaded a new video on the Mechanical Kinetic Art channel. We have featured some their moving sculptured before, this video features a number of sculptures, the first is 9 wooden gears that rotate around themselves. There is a motor driving the sculpture which looks like it must be connected to the center gear. I am assuming that the 8 outer gears are connected with a square frame since I am assuming that the center of the outer gear locations don’t change relative to each other. Given all the different models I am not quite sure which one is my favorite. |
|
If you have ever been in a remote area and pulled out your laptop I bet you couldn’t find any open WiFi hotspots. Well with this Wind Turbine powers WiFi-Repeater that Dan Lampie and David Brenner from the Rochester Institute of Technology built that problem has been solved on a tiny budget. A highly directional antenna is used to send and receive the WiFi data from a location with internet connectivity to the remote area and a WiFi repeater is used to extend the wireless. That is all well and good but chances are your remote location isn’t going to have a handy outlet to plug into. To solve this Dan and David use wind and solar power to charge a battery that powers the rig. Thanks for the tip David. “The power meter works by reading the amount of current flowing into the batteries from the turbine on a continuous basis. This is achieved using a Hall-Effect current sensor that can read up to 30A, which is much more than what the turbine is capable of. We utilized two Linksys WRT54G routers running the DD-WRT firmware to achieve Internet connectivity. One router was located on the second floor of an RIT building .33 miles away from the communication node. The router in the office was connected to the Internet and used a 8dBi external omni directional antenna to broadcast the signal. The communication node’s router used a 19dBi parabolic directional antenna pointed at the router in the building.”
|
|
Spiral Brain (who was a recent contest winner) has made an interesting Spinning Mirror Laser Project. At first when I watched the video the beginning looked like someone was spinning a few bright LEDs in their hands on a dark night. The patterns that followed show off the capability of the system to make some nice looking complex pattens. “The main hardware setup consists of a Laser and two motors. A mirror is attached to each motor in a way that the mirror is slightly tilted to the axis of the motor. when the motor rotates the mirror the plane of the mirror is not flat and projects the laser in the form of circles. each motor creates a circle from the light falling on it. this combines to create circles within circles thus creating the effect. to add to the effect the laser light is pulsed using PWM which breaks the circle into lines further enhancing it.”
|
|
The prize this week is one of our new IR Jammer kits that was just released this week, this will let you jam the infrared receiver on any infrared remote controlled item such as a TV or stereo. If you are looking to solder together your first project this would be a great project to start with since everything is through hole (no surface mount components). This contest will run for one week (July 17 – July 23, 2010) . 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 August 8, 2010 The item to guess was a pipe organ The winner is Danny L. (there were 164 entries) ————————————–———- Below is a picture of the prize.
|
|
Andrei Mehiläinen from the Tampere University of Applied Sciences has completed a number of interesting projects. Two of the most interesting ones are the Temperature Logger and the LCD Thermometer. The temperature logger uses a PIC18F4550 microcontroller and a Microchip MCP9701 for sensing the temperature. I used the LM35 in PWM Fan Controller project but based on what I see I think I will need to look at the MCP9701 for future projects. In the LCD Thermometer project Andrei actually uses a few LM35 temperature sensors and a 16F88 microcontroller in the project. If you are wanting to see what makes the LCD Temperature project tick have a look at the source code which is provided via the link at the bottom of the project page.
|
|
Our friend Daniel Eindhoven from Megavolts found a great price on some huge used capacitors. These capacitors normally cost around $90 each, Daniel was able to pick them up for around $2 a piece! That is one hell of a huge capacitor bank on a nice budget. He also designed an interesting mechanism to tie the batteries together. Instead of using wire or busbars he designed a few laser cut sheets of metal and PCB. The PCB is acting as an insulator between the two metal sheet conductors. So the next question is how does one switch that type of power? The light switch at Home Depot is not going to cut it. “My new capacitor bank is finished! This bank holds 38x 4700uF and 2x 3300uF capacitors of 350V in parallel (total 0,1852 Farad). It can hold a maximum energy of about 11344 Joule. Specifications: Capacitance: 185200uF
|
|
Remember the Tool Carying Robot that we featured here many months ago? Well there is now a new remote controller for that robot, the controller is universal so it can be adapted to control other robots as well. The design is based on a Parallax microcontroller and Xbee chips for communication. Thanks for the tip John
|
|
| ||||||
|
Have a look at the 
