Our friend Ian Lesnet from Dangerous Prototypes is sure Rockin the Open Source Hardware Project Space. As many of you know he is attempting to build a new open source project every month (well at least every month on average). Most of you probably didn’t know that Ian and I worked over at the AOL property DIY Life for a short time (Ian longer than me). Hot Hardware did a great interview with with Ian recently, if you want to learn more about the Open Source Hardware Project space and what Dangerous Prototypes is up to this article is a great read. Thanks for the mention of Hacked Gadgets in the interview by the way Ian!

“Q: The Web Platform is described as a “tiny server” … is it actually a server? What kind of CPU? Does it have any storage/memory?

It is a starting point for designing things that need Internet access. It has a 16bit CPU with 8K of RAM and runs at 80MHz, a microSD card is used for storage. The software can be changed over USB. The community uses it for lots of stuff, everything from home automation to remote weather stations.”

What does it take to make an 8 foot tall R2D2? Well if you are Darth Len it takes a bunch of cardboard boxes from refrigerators, air conditioners and dryers. Then you need lots of tape to hold everything together. It was about a 50 hour build and looks to be hard to move around since it wouldn’t be easy to squish into your 4 door sedan.

Via TechEBlog, Gizmodo and Technabob

After I upgraded my Android phone I was pleased to see the new Google Voice Search options. It actually works quite well. The guys over at Breakfast had some great fun making The Verbalizer which allows physical world control over the Google Voice Search.

Via: Make

“Out of the box, the Verbalizer connects wirelessly to your computer via Bluetooth and when triggered, opens google.com in a new tab and activates Voice Search. An audio notification is played signaling google is ready for your query, which is spoken into the on-board mic. The board is Arduino compatible and we left some I/O pins open, so it’s easy for anyone to jump in and create something nutty with it.”

Electro Bob decided to upgrade his Ikea halogen spot lights into using LEDs so that he could run them all night. Bob removed the guts of the spotlight housing and installed his new high power LEDs which were mounted to two L brackets for heat sinking. I would have never thought of using orange LED like Bob did but he says that they are easier on the eyes at night.

“The LEDs used here are 350mA types, but I made a constant current supply to use them at about 160mA because this provided good enough lighting. In this setup, even in the closed spot light, the heatsink barely heats which means that there is adequate cooling.”

Last week we showed you a Bluetooth Cell Phone Garage Door Opener. This Smartphone WiFi Garage Door Opener by Tuxgraphics accomplishes the same thing but does it in a totally different way. This project uses a smart phone to interact to an ethernet board which is running  a web server, using the soft buttons from the page displayed you are then able to control outputs on the board. When these are connected to your garage door you have one of the coolest door openers in your neighborhood. If you are interested in making something like this a good place to start is the Tuxgraphics online store.

“From a hardware point of view you need:

• A tuxgraphics ethernet board. You can assemble one from a kit or you can use a pre-build SMD board.
• A small 5V or 6V relay for the first door and for every other door a relay + relay driver parts (a transistor, some resistors, a diode).
• A 5V DC power supply for the ethernet board (old Ericsson or Blackberry mobile phone charger can e.g be used for this). The power supply should be able to deliver 5V DC and 300mA or more (depends on the relay).
• A switch to sense the state of the door. This switch is optional but very much recommended.

From a service point of view you need:

• An internet connection that allows you to run a small web server at home. Most DSL internet connections allow that. Smaller ISPs will offer this possibility normally as part of the standard package. Some larger internet service providers may charge an extra fee or ask you to apply for a “business account”. Those providers use a firewall to cut incoming connections and they charge an extra fee to bypass the firewall. If you are not sure if your ISP allows incoming connections then just give them a call and tell them that you have a garage door opener which shows up as a web server and if you will be able to use it.
• A static IP address or a subscription to a dynamic dns service such as dyndns.org or freedns.afraid.org. Initially you can test the system as well by entering just the the IP address (e.g http://173.178.243.189 or http://173.178.243.189:80 ).”

The prize this week is a solar flashlight, if you want to use this as a flashlight you better charge it during the day and not hidden in a drawer. I am thinking that the housing could make for a very small surface mount project. Not sure if the solar cell would have enough power to energize a very low current circuit but I would think it should. This contest will run for one week (July 9 – July 15, 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 roll forming machine

The winner is Bill J. (there were 46 entries)

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Below is a picture of the prize.

If you haven’t seen a TIX clock before you can see (or purchase) one from Think Geek. They are very cool looking, and in my opinion. I first saw them being used by Chris Pirillo. What is better than buying a TIX clock would be to make your own, that is exactly what Guido Seevens from Gweeds.net did. He documented the DIY TIX Clock build here and provided all of the AVR code so that you could make your own if you so desired.

“Originally I wanted to have time adjustment done via a pulse encoder.  So one could select the hours or minutes and then tweak them up or down using a little rotary knob.  Unfortunately, finding components like rotary encoders in little old New Zealand is a bit difficult, so I had to resort to 3 push buttons.  Secondly the display had to be multiplexed as there is a total of 27 LED’s in the display.  Having all those LED’s on at one time would draw great amounts of current plus also needing a great number of IO lines.  I ended up multiplexing the display from left to right, so that there is never more than three LED’s on at any time.”