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The CES Unveiled Event was fun, there was some good food, some light background music from the live band and an open bar. Oh yeah, I forgot there was also a ton of press struggling to get in position to record some clips of the latest and greatest products. All I can say is the main CES event better be less congested than this was! There were lots of people in attendance that you would recognize, the short list was John C Dvorak from PC Mag and TWIT, Max from Zedomax and Todd Cochrane from Geek News Central. The video is not of any products but rather a quick walk through of one side of the event to get a feel of the room. I see that BoingBoing shot a video of the CES Unveiled line, I didn’t think it was that long when I got into line but wow am I ever far back (around the 1:28 minute mark in their video). They were very organized and got the people into the event very quickly.
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While planning my trip to CES I was trying to think of an easy way to enhance the ability to take decent pictures of products and decent video. My camera takes decent videos but doesn’t have mic input. On my budget I settled on keeping my existing Canon camera to take pictures but as you can see from our Island Tech 2009 coverage the audio was horrible. I also wanted the ability to shoot HD video if I wanted, I selected the Canon Vixia HFR10 camcorder which records directly to SD memory cards and has a mic input. I will be feeding audio into the camcorder from a Zoom H1 microphone, a 1/8 inch audio connection between the mic and camcorder will be used. Since he H1 is also a stereo recorder I have the ability to record to the built in micro SD card and sync the audio and video in post production. Hopefully the audio and video quality will be better than what is was in the past. Now that I have a way of taking pictures and shooting video I wanted some way to carry it around that wasn’t very cumbersome. I know that the camcorder could live on a tripod and the camera could be slung around my neck but I didn’t think that was very appealing so made up a quick and dirty bracket that would allow mounting to the tripod mount and give me two spots to attach the camcorder and the camera. The bracket was designed in CAD and cut on my V90 CNC machine out of 1/2 inch plywood. The bolts are normal 1/4 inch bolts and the large nut that gets bolted to the tripod is a 1/4 inch threaded nut that is 1 inch long. The nut was fixed in place with 2 part epoxy followed by a quick sand and a blast of black spray paint. I could have made it look much better but this was built the night before I left. I was also going to grind the nut to 1/2 inch so it would be flush with the bracket on the top and bottom but since it isn’t in the way and can’t really be seen when the cameras are mounted I decided to just leave it as is.
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Hey guys, Hacked Gadgets will be live at CES this year! This is my first time at the event so I am looking forward to seeing what all the hype is about. From what I have seen, no matter what niche you are interested in you will find what you are looking for here. If there is something you would like to see let me know and I will try to get around to it. You can leave your requests in the comments or by email. |
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This is one crazy 8*8*8 LED Cube Build. We have seen other LED Cubes here before but I have never seen one documented as well as this one, if you are looking for some pointers when you build your own this project would make for a great resource. Latches are used to provide the large number of outputs needed to interface to the cube. Check out the video below for the great results. Thanks Christian “To get get the required 64 output lines needed for the LED anodes, we will create a simple multiplexer circuit. This circuit will multiplex 11 IO lines into 64 output lines. The multiplexer is built by using a component called a latch or a flip-flop. We will call them latches from here on. This multiplexer uses an 8 bit latch IC called 74HC574. This chip has the following pins:
Here is what you need to make a LED cube:
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If you think about the technology in the 70s and wonder what a home made calculator would look like this is exactly what I have in mind. A wooden box is used to house multiple small circuit boards and reams of colored wires connect everything together. I remember hearing about the Woz designing many of his creations on paper rather than with actual electronics since the parts were so expensive. In this case the cost of purchasing a similar calculator made building one from scratch a viable option. This is almost unthinkable these days where you can get a calculator for less than a dollar and it has a built in battery and solar power as a backup! Via Hack a Day “Back in the good old days of the early 1970s, small desktop calculators were made by several companies. However, they cost quite a lot of money. The average engineer didn’t have that much cash lying around, but still wanted to relieve himself of the burdens of manual mathematical computations.”
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Not sure why car manufacturers held onto bulbs for so long. LEDs are the dream solution to the high vibration hard to get to locations that these car bulbs are normally found. Our friend Pete Mills had one of his map lights go bad, the fix for him cost a few dollars and the parts were easily harvested out of a cheap LED light. Benefits of this cheap fix is it will never need to be touched for the life of the car, the light will be more pleasing and draw next to nothing for current. “You can also see the PCB traces I cut to allow the parallel/series modification. The +/- 12v (nominal) power leads on the LED board are soldered to the wires that used to deliver battery voltage to the incandescent bulb. The connector for the original lamp was left in place electrically and solder joints were insulated against short circuits.”
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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 (January 1 – January 7, 2011). 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 January 29, 2011 The item to guess was Cable Extrusion Machine The winner is Wim R. (there were 59 entries) ————————————–———- Below is a picture of the prize.
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