Next time you are picking out a Christmas gift for someone why not get something that is hackable and improve on the original design. With a ton of electronics stuffed inside this Big Mouth Billy Bass it now makes for the ideal gift! If you are interested in seeing how it was all put together there is a schematic available.

“The CPU board has a pair of 18F452 PICs. One controls the BMBB and MP3 player. The other is dedicated to the display. Various LEDs and the 10 position switch are connected to both PICs. The fish has three motors to move its head, tail and mouth. I used TIP3055’s t0 drive the mouth and tail. I used two relays to move the head due to its large current draw. The stock BMBB used 6vdc to control all three motors. I used 6vdc for the mouth and tail and both 4 and 6vdc for the head. If you apply only 4 volts to it, it will move half way and stop. This allowed me to make the BMBB more animated.”

This Step-a-Sketch project is sure to bring back some memories if you are around my age. I remember having one of these growing up, I think I got it for a Christmas present one year. Unfortunately it was killed when I was going through my how does this work phase. Almost everything with screws around me got taken apart, some were even put back successfully. By using a PIC 16f84a microcontroller tied to a home made unipolar stepper driver Chris from Powered By Nerd was able to allow a computer is able to send CNC pulse data to the PIC and the PIC then controls the stepper motors to draw a 2D image on the Etch a Sketch. We have seen a similar project before and the same project in reverse, something about a toy from my childhood brought to life with modern electronics that is a pleasure to see. If you want to build one for yourself Chris has provided the code and schematic to give you a head start.

Thanks for the tip Jeff.

“This code works fine, but it would need some work before it’s connected to an industrial machine.  The most glaring problem is that the PIC will not take the same amount of time to execute the code every pass through the program, due to whether or not one or both of the motors have been instructed to move.  This could also account for some of the hesitation I occasionally see.  An easy solution to this would be to add delay loops into the code, when no real work needs to be done.”

If you love old video games this new version of PONG is sure to make you smile. The guys over at Evil Mad Scientists Laboratories have knocked this one out of the park! It is mostly laser cut plywood and plastic with only a touch of electronics.

Via: Hack A Day

“Inside the wooden paddle box are two timing belt pulleys. One is turned directly by a knob that will be added to the top, and the othe is free spinning. As the timing belt turns it slides the paddle assembly, which is mounted to the linear slide system and can move up and down the slot.

The overall feeling that you get turning the knob is a lot like operating foosball controls.”

If you have a hard time coming up with a good excuse in a split second then you need this PIC 16F690 based Emergency Excuse Generator. Next time the boss calls all you will need to do is give the big red button a press and bingo you will have an instant excuse to recite to your boss. Full build details, code and schematics are provided.

I haven’t heard of the random number generation method used here before. I guess the built in pseudo-random PIC random number was not good enough? Maybe the creator can leave a comment to clear that up.

Thanks for the tip Alexander.

“Any time the need arises, you will have an original, freshly-generated excuse ready in seconds. One press of the button can get you out of a tight spot ensuring smooth sailing toward retirement and guaranteeing that you don’t have to perform any actual work.

Most similar projects use the user input (for example, the length of time a button is down) to generate random numbers. The button press time is used this way here too, but this is not enough for the Excuse Generator. One can get just several random bits out of a single button press, and for this project we need a constant flow of random numbers, even with a low degree of randomness. To deal with this problem I came up with the RC circuit connected to RB5. Most of the time RB5 is configured as an output that keeps the capacitor discharged. When a random number is needed RB5 is configured as a high-impedance input. The capacitor starts charging through the 1M resistor, while the microcontroller counts the elapsed time. When the capacitor voltage reaches logical 1 level, the value of the counter is taken as a random number. This works pretty well because the slow charging through the 1M resistor and the exact level at which logical 1 is detected by the microcontroller are quite noisy processes. However, special care must be taken when choosing the capacitor and resistor. I would recommend using a film/foil type capacitor- anything with low leak current. Depending on your capacitor, you may have to use different resistor value. Higher values will mean higher degree of randomness, but slower response time for the Excuse Generator.”

So a few days ago we featured a video that Dave Jones did about how he fixed his plasma TV. Well he didn’t really fix it as many of our commenters pointed out, in the end the clever fix was to mask the problem to make it mostly usable again. Johannes mentioned in the EEVblog comments that he saw this video. It is a much superior solution since Dave only masks the issue, in this video you can clearly see that it’s no more invasive (don’t need to take off the cover). And it brings the picture quality back to the original state. Tools are minimal and you probably already have a baseball bat in your closet.

Just in case someone stumbles on this article looking for a way to actually fix their plasma TV, please don’t fix your TV with a baseball bat unless it is non reparable. In that case whack away to get your frustrations out!

Thanks to Sascha from I Build Rockets for sending in this tip. It’s a machine that does nothing other than keep a switch in the off position. Turn the switch on and a hand pops up immediately and turns it off. The circuit has no microcontroller, it is all analog. I am thinking this could make for an interesting project, who will be the first to make a kit for this available? I am thinking that fellow Canadian SaskView will be in the business of selling these very soon.

Dave Jones had a Panasonic Plasma TV die on him. Have a look at the video to see the build quality of a Panasonic. Turns out that the local TV repair shop would charge more to fix this 2.5 year old model than a new one costs now. The solution to the problem is quite technical, the repair consists of about 1 meter of black electrical tape.