Ebay is a great place to look for some vintage tech. Have a look at this CD duplicating robot that TINYenormous got for only $11. Instead of ripping out and replacing the control electronics he lucked out and found someone who had details on converting it to serial control.

 Thanks Ross.

"I bought it intending to put an arduino in the place of the control board and probably have to do a lot of reverse engineering. The next day I happened upon this site where, amazingly someone has already opened one of these up and has instructions on how to enable serial control! I still am in awe of how lucky I got and really happy that DarkBane dropped all of that knowledge on the world."

Have a look at the TinyProjector Lab Notebook project for some cool laser projection prototyping. See two of the ten prototypes below.

Via: Elektronika

"The biggest challenge for designers of mobile communication devices is presenting large amounts of information on very small displays. As the form factor of these devices continues to get smaller and our demand for mobile information continues to grow, the task only gets more difficult.

·         8 Lumex laser diodes

·         Single, compact row

·         Separately 3D printed holder for lenses and diodes

·         Diodes mounted with U shaped double wires

·         Sweeping mirror (single strip stainless steel), mounted on single axle at one edge of strip

·         Driven via one-arm crank (aluminum) and 6mm pager motor

·         Closed-loop system with IR LED and photodiode

·         Refresh rate 25Hz

·         Bigger PIC (16F877) with enough memory to display all characters"

Connecting a keyboard to a microcontroller project could be a useful addition. Even if it is to be used as a code input device it could be more convenient than using a key matrix. The guys over at Nerd Kits have put together an informative video that is based on the NerdKit however it is applicable to any microcontroller.

"The PS/2 Interface is quite easy to implement. To send a key stroke, the keyboard begins driving the clock line. On the falling edge of the clock line, the data line represents the current bit. Each keystroke is sent as 11 bits: first a start bit of 0, then the 8 bits of the scan code (least significant bit first), then a parity bit (odd parity, which we did not implement for simplicity’s sake), and finally a stop bit (always 1)."

Droky sent in a great DIY Game of Life Build that uses a PIC 12F683. There are lots of details and he also provides the board layout and the PIC code so you could make your own. The capacitive sensors are a nice touch, the board also looks very well done!
Here is the English Google translated version.

"As it did not have enough memory on the PIC, I broke the screen with a grid and thus convert the 84×48 array of pixels in a 25×17 matrix (405 cells) that I do fit in the RAM of the PIC. The next problem was to calculate the next generation, and he needed two RAM arrays, one for the incoming generation and one for output. I’ve solved by calculating the next generation line by line and using a LIFO stack of type 2 levels on 2 variables of type vector."

Game of life from Droky on Vimeo.

Scary Lady bought a skeleton and hooked up some pneumatics to it to bring it to life. She takes it to the next level by controlling it with a DMX system. That way she can control the lights, skeleton movement and music! I bet there will be some super scared kids in her yard this year.

Here is good way to recycle some of those old CD-ROM drives that you probably have laying around. Jason Dorie took inspiration from my Hard Drive Clock for his build. You can see the details in these three posts. CD-ROM Clock Part 1, CD-ROM Clock Part 2, CD-ROM Clock Part 3.

“Basically I’m using the motor and CD holder from the drive, as well as most of the original chassis. I’ve hacked up the motor so an RC hobby brushless controller will spin it, and I’ve got a clear CD with a hand etched into it (you can see it in the ‘back’ image). I’m going to write some microcontroller code to run the motor, sense the RPM, and strobe some LED’s at the right time (like the hard drive clock does) to make the display.”

If you get a bit queasy when seeing someone swat a fly please skip to the next article. This microcontroller that has been mounted to the back of this beetle has the ability to drive him as he flies. I can just imagine the possibilities that will soon be reality. Take a few hundred of these with cameras on them, have some real time computers control them to snap images of the entire environment and use some software like Photosynth to re-create the entire 3D map of the area. Just imagine this happening behind enemy lines, flying around in enemy bunkers. If you are interested in this technology have a look at some of the other developments that we have featured before such as the Remote Controlled Pigeon, Rat Brain Remote, Moth Head Robot and the Cockroach Robot.

Via: Make

"The miniaturized system developed by Sato and his colleagues is mounted onto the pronotum (the dorsal, or upper, plate of the exoskeleton), and consists of electrodes implanted into the brain and wing muscles. Flight commands to start and stop flight and control the insect’s elevation and turning were generated on a personal computer running specialized software, and transmitted to a microcontroller which is equipped with a radio transceiver and powered by a microbattery."