The guys over at Utah Aerials are having some fun over the US Thanksgiving Holiday by making a Turkey Quadcopter that can drop Pies!  These are the same guys that made the Flying Mr T that we saw a few months ago.

“It is constructed of four long sheets of poster-board for the cylinder, and smaller pieces for the head, wings, and tail with some small parts that are folded over for strength. The cylinder is lifted by straightened coat hangers that are zip-tied to the quadcopter’s arms.”

Joe Grand who you might remember from Prototype This has been working on a Laser Range Finder, he has been nice enough to share his build issues and successes over at the Parallax Forums. He demonstrates how a CMUcam can be used to look at the reflected laser dot to determine range based on triangulation. The Parallax CMUcam he is using looks like it is currently out of stock at the moment though.

“I decided to go with the method of optical triangulation whereas the distance to a targeted object is calculated using triangulation with simple trigonometry between the centroid of laser light, camera, and object. The most compelling example is the Webcam Based DIY Laser Rangefinder (http://sites.google.com/site/todddan…m_laser_ranger) and my design is based, in theory, on this implementation.”

Magnetic Swipe Cards are used everywhere, probably the most common one that we all have in our wallets is the one that is built into our bank and credit cards. Craig from the Flashing LEDs blog was had a reader that was sitting around with no purpose. He swiped his University ID through it and found that the only thing on track 2 was university ID number, this card system is used for lots of systems around the university. He built a system that was able to simulate the card being swiped. Turns out there might be more to the card than what is living on track 2 since it was not able to fool the card system but I am betting if all of the tracks were analyzed the security that the card provides might come crashing down.

Read the full Spoofing Magnetic Swipe Card Project article here.

“The features I wanted were:

• Should be as small as practical so I feel more like an awesome spy. Lots of surface mount components, and a professionally made PCB (from batchPCB.com)
• Needs a powerful, compact battery to run the coil. Also needs to be something I have hanging around. I went for a 9V, and designed the PCB to have the same outline as a 9V battery so it could sit on top of it.
• Should be able to store card sequences in memory and let me select which sequence to generate
• Should be able to interface to a card reader so I can record a new card just by swiping it instead of needing a computer
• However if I do have a computer handy, I should be able to use it as an RS232 adapter for the card reader and display decoded info on a terminal.”

The guys over at Motocross Boards have built some cool looking motorized boards, they remind me of the Wheelman that we saw about 4 years ago but check out this battery operated version! The MXB Shocker has a 1,500-watt, 48-volt brushless DC motor that is capable of pushing the machine to 35 mph. This looks like one amazingly fun ride and when you get to where you need to go simply plug it in to enjoy a fun ride back home.

Via: Zedomax

Thanks to Protostack for sponsoring the contest this week. They will be providing a USBASP AVR Programmer to the winner. The AVR programmer is based on the Thomas Fischl’s USBasp design and connects to your computer’s USB port.

“Some of the features include:

• Support for AVRDude from version 5.2 onwards
• Allows you to to read or write the microcontroller EEPROM, firmware, fuse bits and lock bits
• Support for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows (will work on vista)
• 5 KB/sec maximum write speed
• Software controlled SCK option to support targets with low clock speed (< 1.5MHz)
• 10 pin pin ISP interface“
  

This contest will run for one week (November 20 – November 26, 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 November 27, 2010

The item to guess was Closeup of a Terminal Block

The winner is Bobby L. (there were 148 entries)

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Below is a picture of the prize.

Jee Labs has some interesting modules that can be used as cool building blocks or if you want to build your own based on their ideas you can because all of the design details have been released. This Indoor Temperature, Dewpoint, Humidity and Pressure Monitoring System is a great example of what can be done with a few of these modules.

If you ever wanted to connect your microcontroller project to a VGA monitor this AVR Microcontroller VGA Output project by LucidScience will contain lots of great information. The bare bones part of the project is very interesting to see how little is needed to interface with VGA. A free port and a few resistors and diodes is all that was needed. To generate better quality images read further into the article and you can see how some additional hardware can make the display all that much better.