Hackaday Links: Saturday, April 30th Custom EBike with a 200+ km range [Doctorbass] constructed an awesome electrical bike back in 2008 from a Mongoose bicycle. The bike boasts a top speed of 76km/h and a total range of 210 km on a single charge. Some car company needs to hire this guy STAT. [via Make] [...]
BBC covers an old-school hacker Yesterday, the BBC posted an article on [Julian Skidmore]‘s AVR-based homebrew computer. [Julian]‘s project uses an AVR and a derivative of Forth to recreate the capabilities of the 8-bit computers of yesteryear. With 8kB of RAM, [Julian] got a TV-out up and running, and even included code for a Lunar Lander game. We’re [...]
A visual history of the computer mouse As we all go about our day to day activities, it’s easy to get lost in technology and take for granted things that have slowly evolved over long periods of time. Take for instance the mouse on your desk. Whether it’s a standard 2-button mouse with a scroll [...]
Data scraping and visualization with Python [Greg] built himself a small indicator dial with his laser cutter, and wanted to use it for visualizing server performance and load information. Before he started using it for server monitoring however, he thought he should test out his data parsing skills on a simpler data set. Pachube has [...]
The Silicon IC 50th Anniversary Today marks the 50th anniversary of the first silicon integrated circuit patent. We should not have to explain how important the integrated circuit to this crowd, but it is the biggest thing in electronics since sliced bread. [Robert Noyce] received the landmark patent on April 25th 1961, and went on [...]
Single-chip digital audio player [Dmitry Gr.] built a simple circuit to playback digital audio. At the center you can see an 8-pin PIC 12F1840 microcontroller. It’s pulling audio data from a microSD card which is read through a full-sized SD card adapter to which he soldered jumper wires for all of the necessary connections. There [...]
Adding a pedal to a Yamaha DD35 drum kit [Paul] Wrote in to tell us about a quick project that might be useful to others out there. He was having some problems with the DC jack on his Yamaha DD35 portable drum kit. Naturally, he did what most of us would do and just broke out the [...]
Hacking cakes with LEDs A large part of science is making mistakes and learning from them in order to make each subsequent design that much better. When your experimentation involves hacking cakes, each failure is an exercise in deliciousness. [Craig] and his group of research partners often bake electronics-related cakes whenever part of the team [...]
Simple IR Bounce Tachometer [Rajendra Bhatt] writes in to let us know about a nice simple IR bounce tachometer. The project uses a startUSB for PIC board and a 16×2 character LCD with a very basic Infrared bounce circuit. Measuring either a reflective or non reflective spot in the rotating object, in this case a [...]
Measuring the ~10 kiloamp output of a large capacitor bank [Norman] put together a rather impressive 22,500 uF capacitor bank. In addition to find things to torture with the strong magnetic field generated by a sudden discharge, he’d like to measure the current pushed from the device. He’s found a way to do this using a [...]
