In the world of electronics we have impedance; the combination of all forces which oppose the flow of electric current. Often times we have circuits with different impedances, 50 ohms for RF, or 75 for cable TV. It’s pretty important to use the right coax in these circuits, else you’ll be wondering why your RG-58 [...]
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There’s no question that Apple has their industrial design down pat; comparing a cell phone charger made by Blackberry or Motorola to the tiny 1-inch-cube Apple charger just underscores this fact. [Ken Shirriff] posted a great teardown of the Apple iPhone charger that goes through the hardware that makes this charger so impressive. Like most
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We’ll admit that we haven’t been following Minecraft like we used to; its been a while since we’ve seen something amazing in Minecraft, but [eloraam]‘s 6502 emulator (part of her RedPower Minecraft mod) takes the cake. The RedPower mod adds a lot of industrial technology to Minecraft. Pumps, solar panels, and pneumatic tubes
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In a decision we completely agree with, these industrious young women decided that playing in the rain would only be more fun if it included an interactive light show. They wanted the rain itself to cause LEDs in their umbrella to light up. To achieve this, they put piezo sensors on each of the 8 [...]
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[Matthew Riese] got frustrated waiting for the future to arrive so he could have his flying car. He decided to take things into his own hands and construct the closest thing he could. This turned out to be a hovercraft. Not only that, but he thought that the most fitting shape for this thing would [...]
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[radicade] wanted to know what real life portals would look like; not something out of a game, but actual blue and orange portals on his living room wall. Short of building a portal gun, the only option available to [radicade] was simulating a pair of portals with a Kinect and a projector. One of the [...]
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If you’re running your own recording studio, you’re going to need a lot of gear that seems excessively esoteric to the non-musically inclined. A rack full of synth gear looks just like any other cabinet of technology you would find in a server room. Electronic musical is, for the most part, very utilitarian looking, but [...]
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Many of you will remember [Mikey Sklar] from the multitude of times he’s been on hackaday. What you may not have noticed is that he is an ubergeek, living off the grid. He has Solar PV battery bank, three electric vehicles, a shipping container loaded with battery powered tools and a small army of iRobot [...]
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[Richard Osgood] is back again with an interesting project. This time he has constructed a color sensor. His initial design was to use three LEDs and a photoresistor. He would shine a red, then green, then blue LED on a surface and record the reflected light with the photoresistor allowing him to determine how much [...]
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There isn’t a hacker out there that isn’t interested at least a little bit in the prospect of building a mission specific rocket to explode someone off the face of the planet… without killing them. We got a tiny taste of what is coming when they let us watch their engine test a few weeks [...]
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This glowing LED is proof that the experiments [Nvermeer] is doing with conductive ink are working. We’re filing this one as a chemistry hack because you need to hit the lab ahead of time in order to get the conductivity necessary for success. He reports that this technique uses a copper powder suspended in an epoxy [...]
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[Gigafide] just finished building this flame-powered phone charger. The concept is not new. He grabbed a Peltier cooler and used the temperature differential between a flame and a heat sink to produce electricity used by the charger. If you search around here enough you’ll find plenty of candle-powered devices, and a few hacks that use [...]
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The NRF 24L01+ radio transceiver can be found in a lot of wireless project builds. But it’s only meant to work at a range of a few meters. [Achu Wilson] found that he could greatly extend the range by as much as 2 kilometers. All he needed to do was build this high-gain antenna. He already [...]
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Over on the RepRap blog, [Rhys] has been experimenting with molten metal to build circuits with the RepRap. Last June, [Rhys] found a neat alloy made of Tin, Bismuth, and a little bit of Indium that melts at around 130° C, and has just the right properties to be extruded with a standard RepRap setup. [...]
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[Chris] hasn’t managed to get his hands on a Raspberry Pi yet, so he ordered a BeagleBone and got down to business. He was surprised to find that there isn’t much info out there about using LIDD type displays with the hardware. This protocol is used in many of the 320×240 smart LCD modules on [...]
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Ever wonder what’s under the hood with a competitive battle robot like this one? It’s usually a big secret as teams don’t care to give their competition any help. But [AlexHrn] decided not only to give us a peek, but also shows us his step-by-step build process for Phoenix, the 30 pound flipping battle robot. [...]
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[Chris Suprock] is interested in using technology to improve your accuracy with a firearm. To that end, he’s using an Accelerometer mounted to a gun to gather feedback about each shot. The hardware setup is pretty simple. We don’t have specific details, but it looks like he’s using a QFN accelerometer chip like you would [...]
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The Sansa Clip+ is a nice little MP3 player and recorder. But it doesn’t offer an input connector, instead relying on the built-in microphone. [Simon Frank] wanted to extend its functionality so he figured out how to add a standard audio jack for analog input. This is not the first time this has been done, [...]
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It’s no secret that we’re fans of open source, and open hardware. And we have to applaud companies like SparkFun who also keep their customers in the loop about what’s going on with the business end of the company. For instance, they were recently contacted by a Sheriff’s office and asked for customer information and [...]
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There’s something special about improvised weapons built for the upcoming zombie apocalypse. Whether it’s a Lousiville Decapitron or a shotgun revolver, we’re always fascinated by homemade weapons. Here’s a few that rolled into the tip line over the last few weeks: You call that a knife? [Joerg Sprave], a.k.a. that German
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[Kilian] sent in a link to a color version of a tiny educational computer. It’s called the Quantumite and it’s designed to be a throwback to the early 80s microcomputers we all grew up on. The Quantumite is a clone of the Maximite, the tiny single board computer / BASIC interpreter designed by [Geoff Graham]. Both [...]
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We’ve seen a few minimalist robots in our time, but very few compare to [Thomas Rinsma]‘s amazingly agile BEAM robot. It’s absolutely fascinating to watch this little robot crawl around on its circular legs. BEAM robots are extremely simple robots built without a microcontroller of any kind. The idea that extremely simple circ
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3d printing has come huge strides in ability to construct detailed objects. Unfortunately, color is still a considerable limitation. Here, some people at the Reprap blog are having fun coming up with an extruder head that actually mixes two colors as it deposits them. Don’t confuse this with the dual head that Makerbot is touting [...]
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[Buddhra] wanted to use a set of ear buds that also had a controller built into the wire. The headset he chose to go with is meant for use with iPod, but he figured it should be possible to make it work with Android too. He was right, and managed to alter the controller for [...]
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[Parker] emailed us today to show off his latest NES portable build. This time he’s using the standard “top loader” NES instead of the typically used NES on a chip. This is pretty cool since the NES on a chip has compatibility issues with some games. For the screen, he uses a common PSone screen [...]
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[Kevin Osborn] is making it a bit easier for young programmers to write programs that interact with the physical world. The device he’s holding in the picture is an Arduino based accelerometer and distance sensor meant for the Scratch language. Scratch is a programming language developed at MIT. It has kids in mind, and focuses on [...]
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In this installement of Retrotechtacular we’re taking a look at Shakey, a robot developed between 1966 and 1972 at the Stanford Reserach Lab. This was a glorious time when students had long hair but still wore long sleeves and ties to do their research. The robot is actually communicating wirelessly with the PDP-10 computer which [...]
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When [Vince] saw a coworker give a presentation with an iPad, he thought to himself what a tremendous waste of computing resources he was witnessing; an iPad is just as powerful as an early Cray supercomputer, and displaying slides isn’t a computationally intensive task. We’re assuming [Vince]‘s train of thought went off the rails
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[Balline] really wanted to play with a hexapod but found the cost to be prohibitive. Being a mechanical engineer, he was able to fairly quickly come up with a stable 3 servo design that would allow him to experiment with the platform. He chose to use wood as the construction material to help reduce costs [...]
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If you’re planning a build that communicates wirelessly to that ‘Internet of things’ we’ve been hearing about, you might want to check out the Electric Imp. This tiny little card connects your project to the Internet without all the hassle of configuring an embedded wireless device. Inside the Electric Imp is a good bit of [.
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A lot of 3D printing and a many servo motors went into this snake-like robot, and it’s only about half of what [Toby Baumgartner] plans to accomplish. In this orientation the snake is rolled into a circle, and apparently some special movements in the segments allow it to roll around like this. He compares it [...]
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We’re used to [Sprite_TM] rolling out his own hacks hot on the heels of new concepts. Now we’re glad to see that [Jeff Ledger] is doing the same thing here. He was inspired by a Kickstarter project which vows to let you use fruit, clay, and a number of other common (but weird for this [...]
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[Craig's] color clock really came together quite nicely. The majority of the body is acrylic, with two large clear squares and a pair of colored discs. All are held in place by a ring of hardware with spacers in them, and the RGB LED strip that is used to display time and date wraps around [...]
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The Ranque-Hilsch vortex tube is an interesting piece of equipment. It can, without any moving parts or chemicals, separate hot and cold compressed gasses that are passed through it. Interestingly enough, you can cobble one together with very few parts for fairly cheap. [Otto Belden] tossed one together in a weekend back in 2009 just [...]
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We know that most of you will have no reason to ever make a miniature X-ray tube. However, we also know that many of you will find this video mesmerizing like we did. [Glasslinger] does a fantastic job of explaining the entire process of creating the mini x-ray tube from, procuring the uranium glass and [...]
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If you’re tired of drinking mere water, like from the toilet, then you should definitely install a [Brawndo] drinking fountain. Apparently, in addition to being what plants crave, geeks also enjoy this futuristic beverage. As with many hacks, this fountain started out with a broken piece of equipment – a water fountain. After searching u
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We’ve seen our fair share of Tron costumes and props, but much like [Sean-h] points out, they are usually pretty bulky and baggy. He’s gone a slightly different route by starting with a wetsuit instead of bulkier items like leather jackets. The lighting is done in the same manner we’ve seen before, copious amounts of [...]
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3D printers are very popular right now. We’ve seen them go from an interesting project to multiple commercial entities. Makerbot seems to be the poster child for the commercial side of things, at least they were. Their former COO [Samuel Cervantes] is now in charge of a new company called Solidoodle. Their main product is [...]
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[Robert Mibus] took on a project which his kids could present to Mom on Mother’s Day. It’s an LED heart built into a ring or necklace box. The series of white LEDs are animated in a chase pattern. The project let [Robert] push his comfort boundaries by moving past a stock Arduino board. Inside you’ll [...]
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Ooooh, nice enclosure! This is a little motion sensing lamp which [Krazatchu] built a few years back as a Mother’s Day gift. The PIR sensor is easy enough to see as the white dome on the front of the case. But look closely below that and you’ll see the LDR which it uses to keep [...]
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