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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 (May 15 – 20, 2011). Ending time is based on central standard time. To enter, identify the item pictured above. 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 June 9, 2011 The item to guess was Digital Humidity and Temperature Sensor The winner is Grant E. (there were 207 entries) ————————————–———- Below is a picture of the prize.
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Rolling your own PCBs is something that is great to speed up the development time when designing a new circuit. Even now that there are quick and fairly cheap board houses that can make production quality boards it still takes days instead of the hours it would take if you made your own in your home lab. Keith Neufeld has perfected the isolation method of PCB creation on his MakerBot. The results are fantastic, now the cutting time of 5 hours needs to be tackled. “I drilled holes in the corners, tapped the upper plate, and enlarged the holes in the lower plate. The socket-head cap screws spin freely in the lower plate while adjusting the upper plate’s height (I used a continuity meter to check when the milling bit was just barely touching the plate in each corner); then the nylon-insert nuts lock the screws in position. The whole assembly is quite rigid once tightened.”
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If you need a stable time base for something such as a clock project have a look at this DIY 1Hz Time Base project from The Hackers Bench. I see that the board that was used is one from our friends at Gadget Gangster. “In principal this circuit is extreemly simple. You build a crystal oscillator, and then you divide it’s output down to 1Hz. The crystal we’re going to use here run at 32.768 KHz ( 32768 Hz ). These are commonly called clock, or watch crystals. The significance of the value is that you can successively divide 32768 by 2 and eventually you will get to 1. There are other values that will do this (all multiples of 32768), but this value is very common. That means the crystal is cheap and easy to find.” |
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Jeremy Mayer built this crazy Head out of Typewriter Parts. What a great use of old parts that would normally be tossed in the trash. Jeremy sure has a good eye for what would look great as different body parts. Make sure you have a look at the large group of pictures of the machine. Via: Laughing Squid
Progress on Bust V from Jeremy Mayer on Vimeo. |
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I hope building a Geiger Counter Project is just fun and not a necessity but if you are feeling curious here is a cool DIY Geiger Counter project kit. Via: Dangerous Prototypes “The Geiger Kit is a board that provides the electronics needed to run, and detect events from the GM tube, along with a microprocessor (ATmega328) that makes it easy to customize a solution for processing and outputting the events. Both the Geiger circuit and the processor can be used independently of each other if desired.” 
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I have seen mice evolve from things that looked like a bar or soap to crazy mice that are supposedly so ergonomic that they hurt my hands to use for half an hour. I am not sure this Felt Mouse would feel good after a few hours but it looks nice and soft. Via: Zedomax “I was inspired by the mouse’s intimate contact with the human skin, which is unique among peripherals. Although it’s more similar to a glove or shoe than a printer, mice are typically made from the same thermoplastics. For such a tactile and purposeful object, this is wrong.” |
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The spring 2011 batch of Cornell University ECE 4760 Designing with Microcontrollers Final Projects are out. Be prepared to spend a few hours browsing through the details of these cool projects. There is everything from a human tracking fan system to a DJ Touchscreen Device. If you are into playing rock paper scissors have a look at the ECE 4760 project below. David Dunn and Chris Fairfax designed and built this rock paper scissor system, I was very impressed to read that they opted to build their own flex sensors instead of purchasing commercially available ones. Their DIY flex sensor is made using copper tape, ESD foam, heat shrink and some electrical tape. The result is a strip that has a resistance of 200K ohms when it isn’t bent and 5 ohms when bent at a 90 degree angle. “Our implementation involved the use of two sensor gloves (one for each player) that tracked bends in the user’s fingers, to determine the symbol put out by each player, as well as hand acceleration, to track the start and end of each game. The game system connected to a computer through the use of a USB serial connection to print game data and game statistics to the computer screen.”
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