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If you love growing plants and wish you could check out what’s happening when you are on the move take a look at this Mobile Phone controlled Plant Growbox that The Cheap Vegetable Gardener has put together. It has the ability to remotely monitor your plants and adjust the environment you are providing for them on the fly. You probably remember the DIY soil moisture sensor and the LED plant grow box that we featured here before, they were also created by The Cheap Vegetable Gardener. “I made the design for this pretty simple, unfortunately I could not connect with my growbox directly using a mobile device because the computer is behind a firewall (which is a good thing) so I used machine that both the mobile phone and growbox can contact…cheapvegetablegardener.com. After creating a quick web service with the following methods the growbox and mobile device could now talk to each other:
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If you have seen the Iron Man movie the image above is sure to be familiar to you. Patrick from Germany shared this project with us in the Hacked Gadgets forum, we have seen other cool Iron Man Repulsor Light projects before but as far as I know this is the first that it truly very dangerous. So a word of warning, do not attempt to copy this build unless you know what you are doing! Patrick already has plans for version 2 in his head, I look forward to seeing that in the future. “The goal was to create a hand-held laser…powerful…balloons pop across the room…cuts plastic… Technical info: - made of 2mm brass-sheet
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Forgetting a babies inside a locked vehicle is an unfortunate event which occurs far too often. Daniel Ogilvie, Peggy Liska and Michael Sherman have developed a solution which puts some TI tech into motion. They developed the SafeBABI concept while interning at TI. Nice that TI allowed them to work on a concept that they have no interest in ever monetizing. One of their cool eZ430 watches is used to alert the user about the forgotten baby. I love the simple implementation since the system doesn’t have much to go wrong. Via: WFAA “The safeBABI (Safe Baby Alert Broadcast Interface) is a product that attaches to a car seat and interfaces with the Texas Instruments eZ430 Chronos watch through a Texas Instruments CC1110 wireless interface. The eZ430 watch sounds an alarm when the watch goes outside the range of the wireless device and a child is left in the car seat. “ |
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Steve Doubek is a Prototype and Design program instructor at the Northeast Wisconsin Technical College. Have a look at the video for a tour of the dream shop where the Wall-e robots were built. The two robots were part of a 9 month build where the 14 students were split into two groups and each had full creative control over their robot, that’s why the two robots turned out quite different. In the videos Steve also goes over in great detail some of the material choices and electronics that go into making these cool robots. One design choice that I found a bit strange is the way they are triggering the Wall-e sounds, a servo is used to press a button on a Replica Prop Sound Board, I haven’t played with radio remote control systems so I am thinking that the typical system doesn’t have digital outputs that are simple to use. UPDATE – Thanks to Steve for supplying a ton of build pictures, some have been added below but for the full picture set have a look here. If I were in Wisconsin and starting a career this program would have been high up on the list, I don’t think going to class would have ever felt like a chore. I look forward to seeing other projects that are sure to come out of this great class. If you need to see more Wall-e Robots have a look at the Wall-e Robot Builds that we featured last year.
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When I first took a look at this HDD Eyez project done by Jani ‘Japala’ Pönkkö over at MetkuMods I was thinking big deal, a few flashing red LEDs but the cap does some nice smoothing and results in a mesmerizing display. Via: Hackolog “We receive pulses from motherboard’s hdd led header. We get the pulses by removing the wire that goes to the original hdd led and replace it with our own wire that leads to our circuit. Optoisolator will charge the capacitor that is connected to the base of the in-built transistor. When the hdd activity gets faster, the ‘ACT’-led will start to shine more brightly because the charge inside the capacitor is getting higher. After this, when the activity dissapears, the capacitor will start to discharge via the base “leg” of the transistor and keep the led lit. When the charge of the capacitor goes slowly down, the led will get dimmer and dimmer and finally stop shining completely.”
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The State of Electronics Documentary will be out soon. Have a look at the trailer for now. Thanks for the tip Dave. “After several months of researching, interviewing and filming, I’m excited to present the first public Trailer to my new Documentary “State of Electronics” – A discussion on the Electronics Industry in Australia. Even though the documentary is focused on Australian Electronics Design and Manufacture, much of it applies to all countries from around the world.” |
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The prize this week is a multi tool, perfect for opening things that were not designed to be opened. This contest will run for one week (October 9 – October 15, 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 October 30, 2010 The item to guess was a Screen from a Commodore 64 The winner is Ric R. (there were 197 entries) ————————————–———- Below is a picture of the prize.
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