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The prize this week is a mini tripod to help you get some great pictures of your next project. This contest will run for one week (June 11 – 17, 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 July 2, 2011 The item to guess was Torque Converter The winner is Jonathan Z. (there were 241 entries) ————————————–———- Below is a picture of the prize.
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RC cars are tons of fun but driving a RC car using your Android Phone would be even better! Antoine Monmarché used an OpenPicus module mounted in the car to get the job done. There is documentation and source code available here. “The RC car (battery powered) is completely controlled by Flyport. The module manages Wi-Fi link to an Android Smartphone and it drives the servo motors (PWM signal). On the following video you see the Android phone internal accelerometers drive directly the RC Car.”
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There are lots of cool instruments that can be played but normally you are limited to enjoying one at a time. Patrick Flanagan has that concept licked with his Jazari Musical Instrument. He is able to control an entire room full of instruments by creating loops on them using his unusual looking hand interface. It uses accelerometers to detect the position of his hand and adjusts the instruments sound accordingly. Using his fingers he is able to switch between instruments. This approach allows him to build layers of instruments until they are all playing in perfect rhythm. The sound is soothing and vastly different than anything else I have ever heard. You can also have fun with this Android app to play a vocal instrument that sounds very cool. Thanks for the tip Jay.
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If you need a Function Generator, this DIY Function Generator project is a simple way to get one built. If you would rather build a kit version take a look here. It uses a LM324N quad OpAmp at the heart of the project. “The box I put the generator in is an old radio transcever box that already had the BNC Bulkhead attached, this was good for me as I don’t have any BNC parts laying around. I took the old BNC male RF pigtail, cut the end of, and soldered on some shielded wire and some leads.”
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Remember the Nixie Clock with LED Accents that we featured last year? Well our friend Muris has made a new version with lots of updates. “Important hardware changes between this new version and the previous one are: - Timekeeping is more accurate and is done by DS3231 (or DS3232) RTC IC
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If you like LED projects as much as I do you will love the Aurora RGB LED Ring Project from The LED Artist. For so many LEDs the color changing is very smooth, the board layout is very nice with just a small center area left for the few surface mount components needed to run the show. Aki has been kind enough to share the schematic for the project but it looks like you would need to come up with the LED driver code yourself though. “The heart of the unit is PIC24F08KA101 micro-controller. Using a proprietary technique, this controller controls 9 x 3 (RGB) independent channels of PWM signals. The unit is a little over 4 inches in diameter. “ |
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This Pool Playing Robot is one heck of a project! Not quite a robot that you could walk into a random pool hall with since the cameras are mounted above the pool table but I still think you would be able to win a few wagers with it. “Thomas Nierhoff, a masters student at Technische Universität München (TUM), used a human-sized mobile robot with dual 7-DOF arms that’s able to manipulate a pool cue similarly to how a human does. A camera above the table tracked the positions of the balls and helped the robot plan its shots, separating each into various difficulty thresholds to help the bot decide which it should take. “ |
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