You probably remember PCB Heaven for the PC Failure Alarm from earlier this year. Giorgos Lazaridis of PCB Heaven has just completed his next project, it is a Custom Men of War Game Console! I am not much of a gamer but I can see how this custom controller would make game play a piece of cake. All of the controls that you need for rapid game play are right there for easy access. The case looks very nice, Giorgos designed a 3D model of the case and cut it on a CNC machine. The back of the case is a piece of acrylic which is lit with a few high brightness LEDs, this allows the outer bottom edge of the controller to have a nice glow. If that wasn’t enough there is a circuit which changes the glow brightness when a button is pressed. In the video you can see that the brightness slowly fades back to a dim level once the key is released, I assumed that this was being done using PWM directly from the microcontroller but there is actually an analog circuit that is providing this effect. Interesting in making one yourself? You can get the microcontroller code here.

Thanks for sharing your project Giorgo!

I am sure most of you have heard about Sparkfun. They were the ones that had the huge giveaway earlier this year. Nathan Seidle created this 10 million per year company from some humble beginnings. It was funny to hear about the the process Nathan went through to get his merchant account. After he applied to get a merchant account and the company sent him a disposable camera as part of their fraud deterrent measures. This was to prove that he was a legitimate company. He needed to take pictures of his inventory, his shipping department and the outside of the business. So he took a few pictures of his bedroom and a shot of the door to his bedroom. The merchant account was approved!

I think this video is a must watch for the entrepreneurial amongst us.

The prize this week is a loupe magnifier, this will let you get a close look at whatever you are working on. This contest will run for one week (October 23 – October 29, 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 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 October 30, 2010

The item to guess was a Resistor Color Code

The winner is Sean P. (there were 232 entries)

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Below is a picture of the prize.

This LED Flare project by Moon Taj is an interesting PIC microcontroller based LED project. You could make this yourself since the schematic and firmware has been posted for us to enjoy.

Thanks Kevin.

“Presented here is a novelty LED “flare”. It’s loosely fashioned from automotive LED safety flares but with a eye toward fun.The combination of display patterns is limited only by your imagination. Our source code provides a minimal base of patterns you can build from. This project was deigned to be low cost, have a low part count and also be easily made at home.”

If you are looking for a new project that could be worked into part of a Halloween costume have a look at this Luxeon RGB LED Light Saber that George Hadley from Nbitwonder put together. The PIC18F2221 based Light Saber is open source and has gone through lots of variations, you can see some of the project build details here. There is lots of custom features that are built into the device but since it is open you could simply download the code and make any modifications you would like to add if there is some feature you would like to have. You can see the first of many build videos below, be cautioned that the high speed camera movements might make you a bit sea sick. If you are still wanting to see more sabers on action take a look at the laser saber and the dual light saber that we featured here in the past.

Thanks George

“The RGBSaber project is an open source RGB Luxeon LED driver. The driver allows for PWM modulation of an RGB luxeon LED, allowing the color of the lightsaber blade to be adjusted to nearly any color in the RGB color spectrum. The current version of the lightsaber firmware supports 24-bit color, allowing for 16,777,216 different color combinations. The RGBSaber project, and all other NBitWonder projects, are made available under a Creative Commons BY-SA license.”

Take a look at this neat prototype GE Light Bulb which uses Jet Engine Cooling Technology. Sometimes we see the use of some obscure technology just for the sake of adding some buzz words to the packaging. I don’t think that is the case here, this LED bulb can put out a serious amount of light but with the new cooling method it can dissipate the heat generated efficiently.

“How GE’s dual cool jets technology works
GE dual cool jets are very small micro-fluidic bellows type devices that provide high-velocity jets of air, which impinge on the LED heat sink. These jets of air increase the heat transfer rate to more than ten times that of natural convection. The improved cooling enables LED operation at high drive currents without losses in efficiency or lifetime. For a given lumen output, the dual cool jets’ improved thermal management reduces the necessary LED chip count. This, in turn, can dramatically lower the cost of the lamp. In addition to performance and cost advantages, this cooling technology enables reductions in LED lamp size and weight. “

This is the next hackerspace challenge. In this episode Crash Space builds a Sidewalk Instrument which uses ultrasound elements to determine how far people are in various places on the sidewalk in front of their space. The distances are then converted into musical notes by using solenoids to bang on things like clay pots and bottles.

Via: The Transistor