Remember the game Breakout? These days with game controls like the Kinect who wants to use the old style joysticks anymore?  ECE 5760 students Meng-Ling (Maxwell) Liu, Thu-Thao Nguyen and Yang Yang designed a game that they call HAND BREAKING BRICKS. They are using an FPGA to display the game on the monitor while it is also monitoring a Terasic CCD module which allows the game to “see” the location of the players hand. The players hand location directly reflects to the location of the ball bouncing bar.

Read more about HAND BREAKING BRICKS here.

“In order control the game using hand motions, we need a device to track hand movement. We chose the Terasic CCD kit, which consists of a 1.3 megapixel CMOS image sensor and an IDE cable to connect to the GPIO port of the DE2 board. We followed the provided code to learn how to use the camera in the kit.
The current image is captured by the camera and sent to the DE2 board, then each video frame is stored in the SDRAM. We detected the hand position in the recorded frame using the skin color detection scheme in the top module.”

Remember the geeky computer aquariums we featured about 5 years ago? Instead of using a computer case this XBOX 360 Aquarium uses a gaming console case. Thankfully the donor XBOX was a not working, if you think the window cut looks great that is because it was cut out using a waterjet.

“The tank itself is made of glass, and is approximately 6″ long, 8″ tall, and 2.5″ wide.  Water volume inside the tank is 0.45 gallons.  The tank is lit with a color-changing (RGB) LED strip.  Lighting color and intensity is controlled with a wireless remote.”

If you have taken some CS courses you have no doubt seen Conway’s Game of Life, if you are a kit builder you have probably seen some nice Conway’s Game of Life kits also. Where the basic kit version has 16 elements Cornell University student Cooper Bills wanted to design a system that had 307,200 elements. What this boils down to is an incredible looking visual effect that requires a massive amount of calculations. Luckily this project was undertaken in the Cornell University Advanced Microcontrollers course (ECE5760) where students had the choice of Altera/Terasic DE2 or DE2-115  FPGA educational boards to work with.

Read more about this FPGA Conway’s Game of Life project.

“The main goal of this project was to implement Conway’s game of life on a grid of 640×480 cells, running at 60Hz. Updating that resolution at that rate requires over 18 million updates per second! This leaves just a few clock cycles per cell for updating. Given that each cell requires 9 values to calculate it’s next value, even with extreme pipelining serial updating would not be possible (without over-clocking).”

This DIY Animated LED Christmas Display is sure to get you in the spirit of Christmas. The sign is built from 134 different colored LEDs, to make this happen some 74HC595 and 74HC14 chips are used. The sign is built to permanently display one message. I am thinking a great upgrade to this project would be to build it with LED matrix boards so it could be used to display other messages in the future.

Check out this Useless Machine built with Laser Cut Plywood Hinge. You have probably seen a useless machine before, it is basically a machine that uses a small arm to turn itself off as soon as someone has turned it on. It is a really fun concept. Martin Raynsford has built one in a cool custom case. His case doesn’t use a hinge as you would expect, instead he is using a cool lasercut plywood hinge system that you might have seen on Make and Boing Boing recently. If you have a laser cutter Martin has made his design available for anyone who would like try their hand at building it.

On a side note, Martin is going to try to make a new laser cut thing every day for an entire year. If you have a laser cutter you might want to keep your eye on his site for some inspiration.

This DIY Camera Crane by Unitips.ca lets you get some amazing video shots and best of all there aren’t any expensive parts needed since the system is based around cheap metal conduit. Watch the video below to see what the results look like and get some build details. There are some spot welded brackets which might be a bit hard to recreate since most of us don’t have a DIY spot welder kicking around, but that would be easy to do with epoxy, rivets or bolts.

When building your own you could have a look at some of the other DIY Camera Crane designs that we have seen in the past to take the best ideas of each.

I am thinking with 7 days still to go this Printrbot Kickstarter has been mildly successful. Of course I am joking, this Kickstarter has been wildly successful! Brook Drumm had a goal of $25,000, the current funding level is a staggering $382,444. 3D printers are really taking off, for example Makerbot recently got $10 million in funding to grow their offerings. But with the price of many 3D printers in the sub thousand dollar mark I think it is perfect for the new movement of makers to move from CNC to the world of 3D! I think in 10 years you will be able to go to your local computer shop and pick up a $100 HP 3D printer that comes with a starter spool of filament. 

To follow the rise of this new company visit the Printrbot website.

“I designed the Printrbot to be the simplest 3D printer yet.  There are some great kits out there – the Makerbot, the Ultimaker, the Prusa Mendel, and others – but none as small and simple as the Printrbot.  This all-in-one 3D printer kit can be assembled and printing in a couple of hours.  Other kits will not only take you many more hours to build, they will also have hundreds more parts, and they will cost more.  My design also does away with the finicky calibration and adjustment from which most 3D printers suffer.   This is the printer a kid could put together. We assemble the electronics, we assemble the hotend, and we put the connectors on all the motors and components… no soldering required!”