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The prize this week is a another clamp meter. This contest will run for one week (Oct 18 - Oct 23, 2008) . Ending time is based on central standard time. To enter, identify the item pictured above and give an example of what can be done with it. Please do not give the answer in the comments.
Send an email to contest @ hackedgadgets.com with "Name the Thing Contest" as the subject, and the message body consisting of:
The winner will be chosen at random from all of the correct entries. ———————————–———- Added October 31 2008 The item to guess was a Wirewound Resistor The winner is Josh H. Thanks to all who entered (there were 73 entries) ————————————–———- Below is a picture of the prize.
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This DIY Wind Turbine looks like it would have been lots of fun to build. This is just one of the cool creations that Mike Davis has put together. Have a look at his main page only if you have an hour or so of free time to look around.
"I started by Googling for information on home-built wind turbines. There are a lot of them out there in an amazing variety of designs and complexities. All of them had five things in common though:
I reduced the project to just five little systems. If attacked one at a time, the project didn’t seem too terribly difficult. I decided to start with the generator. My online research showed that a lot of people were building their own generators. That seemed a bit too complicated, at least for a first effort. Others were using surplus permanent magnet DC motors as generators in their projects. This looked like a simpler way to go. In operation, the wind turbine is connected to the controller. Lines then run from the controller to the battery. All loads are taken directly from the battery. If the battery voltage drops below 11.9 volts, the controller switches the turbine power to charging the battery. If the battery voltage rises to 14 volts, the controller switches to dumping the turbine power into the dummy load. There are trimpots to adjust the voltage levels at which the controller toggles back and forth between the two states. I chose 11.9V for the discharge point and 14V for the fully charged point based on advice from lots of different web sites on the subject of properly charging lead acid batteries. The sites all recommended slightly different voltages. I sort of averaged them and came up with my numbers. When the battery voltage is between 11.9V and 14V, the system can be switched between either charging or dumping. A pair of push buttons allow me to switch between states anytime, for testing purposes. Normally the system runs automatically. When charging the battery, the yellow LED is lit. When the battery is charged and power is being dumped to the the dummy load, the green LED is lit. This gives me some minimal feedback on what is going on with the system. I also use my multimeter to measure both battery voltage, and turbine output voltage. I will probably eventually add either panel meters, or automotive-style voltage and charge/discharge meters to the system. I’ll do that once I have it in some sort of enclosure. "
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Funky Alex has come up with a cool Dual Speaker Laser X/Y Mirror Display. I think with just a bit more volume or some speakers with a longer throw the display would be big and bold. "I have accomplished with laser show program for mac(is also possible with a frequency generator program)and music cool effects. The vibrations from the 2 base speakers (with 1 mirror an each speaker) makes the laserbeam move with the music and the frequencies (audio)."
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Matt Meerian hacked an old intercom into a masterpiece by stuffing it with some electronics.This Ferris Bueller’s Day Off Joke Intercom System has the ability to play MP3 audio tracks with the touch of a call button. The entire thing is controlled by a central microcontroller and the attention to detail by using the old NuTone intercom helps pull off the effect. If you are interested in playing with a similar creation there is sample code and a schematic available. "The hardware is centered around a "Vinculum VMusic2 MP3 player" (that’s a mouthful). The Vmusic2 is the gray box in Figure 3, it has the rainbow wires. The Vmusic2 is from a company called FTDI chip and makes playing an MP3 file from a thumb drive as easy as sending over the correct serial string from the microcontroller. The thumb drive is the silver cylinder in Figure 2, it is the back part of a writing pen. One really nice thing about the MP3 player is the ability to jump from one sound file to another. If the project were to use an audio tape player, it would be rather difficult to keep track of where the sound bytes are located on the tape. (And you also have to allow time to fast forward and rewind) The microcontroller is an ATTiny2313 from Atmel running at 4MHz. The ATTiny2313 has 2 Kilobytes of flash and 128 bytes of internal RAM. This is more than enough to read button presses, light the "talk" indicator, and send out a few bytes to the MP3 player. Just about any microcontroller could have been used; even a basic stamp could handle the hardware requirements."
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With inspiration from this Sprites Mods hack, Bidouille.org has done a cool new version of the hack. Using an Arduino Microcontroller and some custom code the data from the Agilent technologies chip is retrieved. Have a look at this document (PDF) for some more details on what makes the technology work. "Relationship to Object Motion The relationship between the optical flow in the image plane and the velocities of objects in the three dimensional world is not necessarily obvious. We perceive motion when a changing picture is projected onto a stationary screen, for example. Conversely, a moving object may give rise to a constant brightness pattern. Consider, for example, a uniform sphere which exhibits shading because its surface elements are oriented in many different directions. Yet,when it is rotated, the optical flow is zero at all points in the image, since the shading does not move with the surface. Also, specular reflections move with a velocity characteristic of the virtual image, not the surface in which light is reflected."
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Gary Eneberg has made a great looking pair of speakers and documented the steps. For a total cost of $430 US it is a fantastic deal for such a nice piece of work. "The enclosures were made using 3/4" Baltic Birch plywood except for the front baffle which consists of two pieces of 1/2" plywood laminated together. The inner piece of the front baffle fits tightly into the cabinet opening. The outer piece of the baffle was cut larger than the outside dimension of the cabinet and flush trimmed to size once the baffle was glued to the remainder of the cabinet. The port is removable allowing for port adjustments later should they be required. The port was made removable by cutting a hole in the inside piece of the 1/2" plywood which was the outside diameter of the PVC port. Once the two baffle pieces were glued together, the outside baffle hole was cut with a flush trim bit riding the inside of the port. "
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Just a reminder to catch the first episode of Prototype This. It should be good! |
