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Keeping our cat’s water dish topped up is my daughter’s job but it would be something that would be nice to automate. Only thing I would always be scared about is if a sensor went bad or there was some bad code that caused the thing to run for 5 or 6 hours when I was out… I guess having a limited reservoir size would be one way to limit the potential damage. If you are thinking of automating your Pet Water Dish check out this Arduino based project over at AV Brand. Via: Circuit Projects “I decided it was time to build an automatic water dish that refills itself. I bought an icemaker water hookup (designed to attach the icemaker in a fridge to the water supply) and my friend Frysteev helped me plumb it in. The tiny 1/4-inch water line runs to the top of my kitchen cabinets, where it enters an irrigation valve ($22). This valve then runs to some clear tubing, down from the cabinets and into the water dish. Also in the water dish are two sensor wires, one at the bottom and one at the top of the dish. “
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There are some builds that just look like they are too fun. This Fan Scooter is definitely one of those. A ducted fan is bolted to two razor scooters some battery packs provides the jam to get the fan spinning and producing some serious power. Via: Adafruit “Assembled in just under 5 hours, Fanscooter is an attempt to put the latest iteration of the HFF onto something more interesting than a shopping cart. But, what can possibly be more interesting than Fankart? Why not hybridize it with my fascination with rideable things and make… like, a scooter or something? My dumbest ideas always turn out to be the most hilarious anyway. So there you have it: an afternoon of cutting and welding steel combined with the remains of three different Razor scooters (them having been parted out for use in the Electric Vehicle Team scooter design class by students taking 2.007)”
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There will come a time when you want to secure something in your project. You could use a keyswitch but what happens when your key is lost though? Using a keypad allows you to have as many codes programmed as you want and change them at any time. If you are thinking of adding a keypad to an Arduino project have a look at this Arduino Keypad project for some inspiration. It was made by Paul-Arthur Asselin who is 15 year old Hacked/Maker! “The buttons on this particular keypad are setup in a 3X4 matrix format so we only need 7 pins to detect the pressing of 12 keys. For example, when you hit the number 3 pins 5&2 are connected, 6 connects pins 5&7 and 9 connects 5&6. So in code we just look for the combination and we know what button is being pressed.” |
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If you had an Atari computer years ago you might remember the 810 floppy drive. Rossum decided to have some fun and make a 8 GB version which is just a bit smaller than the original. The heart of the hack is a microSDdrive with a microcontroller which handles the interface. “The hardware is pretty simple: a LPC1114 microcontroller, a microSD slot, a 3v3 regulator, a led and some caps. I used the 1114 because they are cheap and I had them lying around after building the Wikipedia reader: just about any 3v3 micro with SPI and a UART would also work fine. “ |
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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 7 – 13, 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 the Urine processing assembly from the ISS The winner is Cliff H. (there were 84 entries) ————————————–———- Below is a picture of the prize.
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Getting our projects to display results usually means connecting them to a computer via RS232 or using an LCD but with a bit of work you can use VGA. Have a look at this FPGA VGA Project for some pointers. “VGA is a very friendly protocol to use with FPGA’s and CPLD’s and because of this we can easily build video controllers with basic PLDs. The VGA protocol itsself is slow, running around the 20-30 MHz range depending on the resolution chosen, meaning that we can even breadboard or wire-wrap prototype designs! “ |
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There are some projects that just take your breath away, this 555 Decimal Adding Machine by Alan Yates is definitely one of those. Via: EMSL “The quiescent device pulls 450 mA from its 9 volt supply. Yep, 4 watts! You can feel the warmth coming from the back of it. I could not find ICM7555s in quantity, so was forced to use LM555CNs, making it a rather power hungry device. The LEDs pull only about 70 mA total, the rest is just burnt up in the 555s.”
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