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If you are into modded consoles have a look at this WiiCube that Hugo Dorison build and sent in. “It is a heavily modded gamecube, trimmed to fit in a much smaller case than the original, with controls and a screen. It also is equiped with a wiikey fusion, a chip normally made for the wii, that has been adapted. Enabling the portable to play games off of SD cards, and remove the disk drive which takes a lot of space. As for the case, I built it from scratch using Vaccum forming on sheets of plastic and implementing various pieces of official Nintendo gamecube controllers.”
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Humberto from Nerd Kits has built a DIY Sous-Vide Cooker. They are not touching any high voltage with their design, instead they are using a dimmer switch to power a crock pot and simply turn the dimmer switch with a small motor that is controlled using a microcontroller. A few small temperature sensors provide feedback so that the water bath temperature can be kept at the desired level. We have seen this method of interfacing with high voltage before with the Adafruit soldering skillet design.
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Here is a great looking Open Hardware High Resolution 3D Printer. I think we will see a lot more 3D printers this year! The more the merrier since I would love one but I currently can’t justify the cost. With this kickstarter you could have one of these for under $2500. You can read more about it on the project site. Via: Electronics Lab “Specifications Build volume varies, depending on resolution. Resolutions in the x/y plane (horizontal) of 50 to 100 microns are possible by adjustment of the projector’s position and focus. Resolutions in the z (vertical) build axis from 100 to less than 10 microns are possible via software selection. Using higher resolutions in the z-axis may result in slower build rates. We suggest using the same z axis resolution as the x/y plane. At the 100 micron x/y pixels setting, the build area is 102.4 mm (4.03″) x 76.8 mm (3.02″) x 203.2 mm (8.0″). At the 50 micron x/y pixels setting, the build area is 51.2 mm (2.02″) x 38.4 mm (1.52″) x 203.2 mm (8.0″). 100 microns = 0.1 mm = 0.00394″ B9Creator will ship with a basic software suite that allows you to import a model stored in standard .stl format. This software will allow you to slice the model and manually position simple supports, if needed. The software will also control the actual print process. The software will be available for current Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems.
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Building a robot requires many things but movement is something that is common in all robots. There are many motor options when building a robot but no matter what type of motor you select they can’t be powered directly from microcontroller pins since most pins can only provide 20 or 25mA of current. The solution is quite simple, the microcontroller simply needs to send a signal to a motor driver chip and you let the motor driver chip do the high current work that is needed when dealing with motors. Chris from PyroElectro written a great tutorial on how to control robot motors. ”The microcontroller that we will use for this part of the Building A Robot series is the PIC 18F252 8-bit microcontroller. It is manufactured by microchip, and most of my tutorials/projects on this website use the PIC. The motor controller IC that we will use is the same as some other tutorials, the SN754410NE Quadruple Half-H Driver.”
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The Microchip dspic33f is used for this Self Balancing Robot that chayben from Australia put together. Bluetooth modules are used to achieve communication link between the robot and the computer running Matlab. On the computer you are able to see the many tiny changes that are needed to keep the robot upright. The stacked round disk PCB design looks and works great in this design. “Processor: Microchip dspic33f |
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We have featured some Wall-e builds in the past, you can see by the video above that Mike Senna’s Wall-e Build is coming to an end. He just posted a video of the current state. It is almost complete and is looking great! He has built some cool macro modes that allows some pre-programmed movements to be done while he drives the robot around. |
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Blair Kelly has designed a fun looking RC car. It has an Arduino mounted in the car, there are a number of sensors that allow Blair to drive the car around viewing the drive on a computer screen. There is even force feedback so when the car goes over a large bump or bangs into something he can feel it. With a head mounted display this thing would be very immersive. The camera is mounted so that it can be moved from right to left. I can just imagine what it would feel like if this right and left camera movement was linked to head movements when wearing a head mount display! Via: Make
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