Bruce Land is showing off the hard work of his students in his Cornell University ECE 4760 Designing with Microcontrollers class. I hope you have a long lunch hour since it will take you a long time to go through all 35 projects. I found this Mechanix Motorized Guitar Tuner real interesting. Nice thing about all of these projects is the great documentation.

See the full list of projects 

"The Mechanix is a motorized guitar tuner for a standard 6-string electric or acoustic fixed bridge guitar. Named in honor of Megadeth guitar legend Dave Mustaine, the Mechanix is a unique and innovative product which has numerous patent possibilities. Our project may not be the coolest or most unique, but it is certainly the most metal. Traditional handheld guitar tuners are passive; they tell the user whether the guitar string is in tune, sharp, or flat, but the actual adjustment of the tension in the string has to be done by the user. This requires a fair amount of dexterity from the user, particularly when fine tuning is required. Thus, to increase both the convenience and the precision of the tuning process, we designed an active, motorized guitar tuner. The Mechanix responds to the user plucking one of the strings by turning the tuning knob until the string has reached its Standard Tuning note."

Looks like the creators of Printball trust their machine. Watch the video to see how much they trust the system! This could make some cool graffiti.

"The PrintBall is like an Ink-Jet printer using a PaintBall Gun as printhead. The gun is mounted on a custum made pan & tilt unit which is connected to a Max/Msp based software through an Atmel chip [programmed in Basic]. The software allow the users to load and analyze images. The resolution of the image and the space between the point [definition the image] can be ajusted. Because the document is printed from a central point the number of steps by points send to the pan & tilt, which is moved by two stepper motors, one for each axe horizontal and vertical, determine the space between each point."

Here is a neat idea to keep some of your old video tapes out of the landfills. The Video Tape USB Hub will give you a cool looking place to plug in your USB cable thumbdrive. I can think of one extra thing to do, install a small motor and keep a small loop of tape that spins when the device is powered.

"Materials:
- One old video tape (preferable one of the shorter tapes for advertisments, they have bigger reels and less tape to take care of)
- One usb-hub (working, of course, and preferable with an option for a powersupply)
- The cable for the hub
- the hub’s powersupply or a molex connector to power your hub directly from your computer’s powersupply
- Two ultra-bright leds in a color of your choice ( and the right resistors for 5volts)
- a small switch if you want to be able to switch of the led
- some cables, one for providing power to the hub and some small cables for wiring the leds up, you will find something suitable
- heatshrinking tube or tape"

Sprites Mods has done it again! Their latest hack is this Automated White Board that can take text input from the internet and plot it onto a white board for the world to see (there is a web cam looking at the board).

"The idea is that if I want the pen to be off the whiteboard, the electromagnet gets released and the spring will push a perspex rod on the whiteboard, thereby pushing the whole carriage, including the tip of the pen, away from the surface. If the pen needs to be ‘down’, the electromagnet will actuate and gravity will push the tip of the pen down to the surface of the whiteboard again. The electronics aren’t that complex: the main task is to make the stepper motors and the solenoid controllable by a PC, and in theory, not much more than a couple of driver ICs or mosfets or something like that are needed for such a task. I opted for a slightly more complex approach: the driver-ICs are controlled by a microcontroller, which accepts the amount of steps the motors need to be moved on a serial port. It then moves the steppers in such a way that they start and stop at the same time, varying the velocity accordingly. For short distances, that gives a neat straight line on the whiteboard. This way, the PC can be relieved of a bit of work. I used an FT232-board I had lying around for for the interfacing: the computer I was planning on connecting it to didn’t have a serial port to spare."

Via: Hackaday

 If you are wanting to grab some free Wifi from someone far away have a look at this Wifi Predator from our friends at i-Hacked.

"The predator is a modified wireless router connected to a high-powered antenna and running custom firmware to actively seek out open wireless connections. Once they are found, it will test them for internet connectivity and then join and repeat the one with the strongest signal to secured wireless connection that YOU control. =) When your predator powers up, it will start scanning for open access points, testing each one for internet connectivity and then finally will join the one with the strongest signal strength that can reach the internet. Then it will make this connection available to you via the AP SSID that you set previously. Join the AP SSID that you created earlier. (IHPRED) If everything worked right (and there is available open wireless access points) you should have internet access. I suggest visiting what ever log you configured to see how it is working. If you chose the html log format visit http://192.168.69.1/user/autoap.htm. Finally lock down your predator like you would do any other Access Point. Change the default admin password, enable SSHd & disable telnet. Enable WPA encryption if you want to protect your newly "acquired" internet access."

Via: Digg

Youtube user KDG86 has made quite a few interesting projects. This Wireless GPS Project is nice and simple but have lots of cool possibilities. He is using a GPS module that outputs RS-232, this signal is connected to a wireless transmitter. A receiver is then used to get the data into a computer. Since it is RS-232 all you need is a terminal program to have a look. He then takes some of the raw data and with one copy and paste his exact location is zoomed into by Google Earth.

Instead of a computer I would feed it into a microcontroller and have it warn me when I am coming close to one of the red light cameras that seem to be everywhere where I live.

So just when you thought all your cell phone was good for was making calls and surfing the net something like this cool program is made that allows you phone to control a cool helicopter! These MikroKopter helicopters look like so much fun even without the cell phone control.

"DUBwise is the acronym for Digital UFO Broadcasting with intelligent service equipment and is a Tool for Mobile Phones to interact with a unmanned QuadroKopter to increase Fun and support SeriousUseCases. Read the section Features to see what you can do with it exactly or Contact the Author LiGi for further questions. Some Background and progress can be found in this Blog."