Archive for June, 2011

Daily Digest June 30, 2011

Driving and old receipt printer It seems like receipt printers are pretty popular as hacking targets lately. Aside from the wasted paper, they cooler than plain old blinking LEDs and we’d image there’s a ton of them floating around out there as advances in technology have prompted retailers to trade in the bulky dinosaurs for [...]

Daily Digest June 29, 2011

A doorbell loud enough to wake the dead [Ed Nauman] runs a machine shop, which we imagine can be quite loud at times. Sick of never hearing the doorbell when he was busy working on things, he decided that the solution to his problem was a new doorbell…an incredibly loud doorbell. His Really Loud Doorbell [...]

Daily Digest June 28, 2011

Giant POV tube for light painting When you really want your feelings known, we always say that bigger is better. [Gavin Smith, aka The Mechatronics Guy] must come from the same school of thought, because there’s absolutely no mistaking what he is trying to say with his latest project. Inspired by this WiFi signal painter [...]

Daily Digest June 27, 2011

Solder paste dispenser hacked to run off compressed air cans [John] got a shiny new solder paste dispenser for a steal, and before he hooked up the tool, he decided to take a look inside to make sure everything was on the up and up. Aside from a few questionable wiring practices he didn’t approve [...]

Daily Digest June 26, 2011

ATtiny13 powered handheld helicopter game [Owen] just finished putting together a portable helicopter game. It’s pretty impressive, especially since he used an ATtiny13 microcontroller. That chip uses an 8-pin dip package, offering only five I/O pins (six if you use the reset pin) and 1k of programming space. The game runs on a small cellphone-type [...]

Daily Digest June 25, 2011

A Beautiful Fibre Optic Chandelier [Bill] Decided that his living room could use some more light, or at least some more colourful light. To meet his needs [Bill] has designed and build what he describes as a modern/contemporary chandelier. The chandelier uses about 250′ of fibre optic cable to distribute the light from eight LED’s, [...]

Daily Digest June 24, 2011

Keeping tabs on your pets’ busy lives [Stephen’s] daughter has a pair of mice she keeps as pets, who happen to be quite active at night. After they kept her awake for an entire evening by running like mad in their treadmill, they were moved from her bedroom. Since they were so active in the [...]

Daily Digest June 23, 2011

Use FPGAs the easy way with Alien Cortex AV Hackaday reader [Louis] wrote in to call our attention to a neat project over at Kickstarter that he thought would interest his fellow readers. The AlienCortex AV is a pre-built FPGA board from [Bryan Pape] with gobs of ports and a ton of potential. At the [...]

Daily Digest June 22, 2011

Puncture resistant bike tires from old seatbelts [Nicolás] often rides his bike in the city, and on more than one occasion has ended up with a flat tire. A flat tire might not sound like a big deal, but imagine if you are a few miles from your destination and running late – now your [...]

Daily Digest June 21, 2011

The Engineering Guy explains fiber optics [Bill the “Engineer Guy” Hammack] is back with another lesson in the science behind the technology we know and love, but might not fully understand. This time around he discusses fiber optic cabling and how it is used to relay data across distances both small and large. He starts [...]