Check out the cool Solar Robotic Bug Hack that Oriental Robotics did. It converts a small cockroach like bug which is normally just battery powered into a bug that is only active in the light. When placed under a dark box they scatter as soon as the box is lifted. This is guaranteed to be a great way to scare the wife also if you put a few of these behind the cereal box in the pantry!

Seekway makes some huge LED displays, this LED Display uses 76 thousand LEDs to generate 3D Images. Creating one of these would be a lot more than a weekend project and unless you have a big building entrance to put it in I doubt you would get much use out of it but it can sure lend some inspiration to some smaller builds.

Via: Hack 24/7

This Arduino and Wii Motion Plus based QuadroCopter uses the Wii Motion Plus and an Arduino to allow for an inexpensive quadcopter to be developed.

Via: Zedomax

Sparkfun has an interesting article on some considerations to keep in mind when working on an Extreme Low Power Microcontroller Design. When you have a design that will be running on battery power it is important to keep power consumption in mind so that the system will work for days and not hours on battery power. I was quite impressed to read that the cheap Sparkfun meter has a uA mode that my much more expensive Fluke meter did not have. I might have to get one of these cheap meters or one of Dave Jones uCurrent device to measure some of these low currents on future projects.

“My overall goal was to get an ATmega328 to go to the deepest sleep possible, waking up only with an external INT button interrupt or with a 32.768kHz TMR2 overflow interrupt (for an RTC). To make this happen you’ll need to tweak the bootloader and some other settings.

In the end I was able to get a ATmega328 to run at room temperature at about 1uA with an active 32kHz RTC and external interrupts enabled. This is fairly phenomenal. Atmel has engineered the ATmega328 to the point that rubbing your fingers together produces more electrical power than a computer capable of 8MIPS on the fly.”

You might remember  the first version of the Electric Mountainboard that Andres Guzman-Ballen had made. Well he just send in a tip about his second version which is very cool. Watch the video above and see some of the details below. Even though it is a single prototype Andres has gone to great lengths to make it very safe, there is a push button on the device that will kill the system if it is not pressed as all times, there is also a safety feature that will shut down the system if communication from the glove to board controller is lost.

“I just used a SparkFun flex sensor (http://www.sparkfun.com/products/8606) to control the board’s speed. The op-amp (http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9456) is used to control the constant change in current, and the microcontroller is what converts the analog signal to a digital one. The data is sent through an NRF2401 Transceiver (http://www.sparkfun.com/products/152) and the microcontroller on my board converts the data to a PWM signal and sends it to the motor controller to change the RPM. I have a killswitch located near the thumb on the glove to make the board fail-safe. The board also uses a semaphore to make sure that an interrupt in wireless communication won’t end up costing me my life.”

When most of us think of solar power we think of solar panels or the new round Solyndra solar tubes that we were starting to see, too bad it looks like Solyndra is gone for good though. Is the future going to be solar paint? That would sure allow for growing the possible surfaces to harvest solar energy from. I can just imagine a future where vehicles have a solar paint and never need to be plugged in. Of course the jump from a functional solar power calculator to car is huge but I think it might happen some day. To be viable the system needs to be about 5 times more efficient than it currently is but seeing that it doubled in efficiency with 6 months of development there is a good chance this is possible.

Read More, PDF Article about the process

“We’re trying to develop a radically new approach to making solar cells by developing materials that can be painted or printed onto surfaces, like ink on newspaper. Right now, solar cells are made using relatively expensive materials deposition processes requiring very high temperatures and high vacuum. This makes it difficult to manufacture solar cells on very large area substrates, and the current processes are relatively slow. The need for high temperatures also limits the kinds of supports for the devices that can be used. For example, photovoltaic devices can’t be made on plastic substrates using the current approaches. The nanoparticle inks that we are making could ultimately be printed onto nearly any substrate, using low-cost roll-to-roll processes”

Ben Heck shows how he designed his Super Alarm Clock in the video above. I like the use of the simple push button rotary knob that is used to adjust the time. Gone is the array of small buttons along the top which have lettering so small it takes longer to figure out how to adjust the time than it does to actually make the adjustment. Having the clock know what day it is so that the alarm doesn’t sound on the weekend is a cool idea, I am not sure why more clocks don’t have this option. A Parallax propeller microcontroller is being used to power the project so there is no lack of power here. Transistor arrays are used here to drive the LED display and a johnson counter is used to control many display elements with only a few microcontroller pins. In the end the entire LED matrix was scrapped and normal 7 segment LED displays being driven by some shift registers were used.