An elevator is something that many people rely on to get around. What happens when a out of the box thinker is stuck on the 5th floor of a building and in need of an elevator to get in and out of his suite? Step 1 is to ask for an elevator to be installed, step 2 is to take it into your own hands and make your own elevator!

Via: HackaDay

This project goes to show that with a bit of imagination you can create some very cool things with off the shelf components. The guys from ADNANONLINE have done. By moving your body around you can control the toy RC car. The Kinect is watching the movement, information is then sent to an Arduino so that the real world control of the RC car is possible.

“RC Car controlled by xBox Kinect through Arduino micro controller .
Developed by Adnan AlHomsi (Adnanonline) http://adnanonline.net
Assistant (xBox part) : Koussay Daadoush”

If you are dealing with LiPo batteries it is wise to use some commercial built charger since they have some special charging needs which is harder to pull off with a dead simple circuit like we could do with NiCad cells for example. Dane had one of these special charging units but has now hacked it to allow him to stream out the serial data from the unit so he can log exactly what it going on with the battery charging!

“I noticed, while toying with the menu’s, That there was a USB enable mode. That nice, however, there’s no USB port. It led me to believe, for the sake of simplicity, the firmware running on the eco-6 was a copy of a larger unit, that supported USB. Ok, that nice, but what the heck I’ll enable it, see where it goes.”

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 (July 23 – 29, 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 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 July 30, 2011

The item to guess was Creusot Steam Hammer

The winner is Earl G. (there were 143 entries)

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Below is a picture of the prize.

Next time you are working on a laser project that needs a small DC motor or a robot arm that is in need of a few gears make sure you have a copy of Unscrewed by Ed Sobey handy. Most of us makers and hackers have a large pile of used parts (some call them junk boxes), they come in all shapes and forms, old VCRs that got retired, the paper shredder that stopped working properly, your old inkjet printer that has a bunch of clogged nozzles. Lots of people see this stuff as garbage and toss it in the trash, we see it as gold waiting to come alive in a future project. Unscrewed lets us have a look inside these everyday items before we even get out a screwdriver, there is a list of typical items that will be found and how it was taken apart. Now this isn’t a service manual so it won’t help you repair anything, and keep in mind that the bit you might want might be the reason the unit was retired but even with one blown part there will still be a hundred other functional parts ready for the taking! Watch the video below for a look inside the book.

Get the book here.

If you are also sad at the death of the Google Power Meter have a look at this Pic Power Meter project over at Pyrofer’s Projects.

“The Pic board counts rotations of the disc in 1 minute increments. Every ten minutes it connects to the server over serial (to ethernet UDP) and uploads all ten readings
The server saves these into a mysql database.
I wrote some PHP code to generate graphs of various data, this is proving to be the hardest part. Getting the data to look good. “

Stynus saw the Drill Battery Charger Repair article and sent in his drill repair to Make a Cordless Drill with a Dead Battery a Corded Drill. In his case he had a battery for his Bosch cordless drill die and with the cost of a replacement being so high he decided to adapt the drill into a corded drill for bench work. He still has the ability to use it as a cordless drill since he still has one functional battery pack. Even if your battery charger is still good the current output from the charger will not be great enough to power the drill.

By gutting the battery pack of the old nicad cells and installing a connector directly to the internal power connection you now have a simple way of powering the drill using an external source. Stynus is using his 12 volt bench supply to power the 14.4V drill so it won’t have the same power and speed as the battery pack did but it will still be usable. A simple series diode protects the power supply from reverse EMF that would be caused by the motor.

One other thing that can be done is rebuild your drill battery pack, you can often get replacement nicad cells quite inexpensively compared to the replacement battery unit from the manufacturer.