[David] sent in his implementation of reading a PS/2 mouse with a PIC microcontroller and some LED displays. Of course, this follows hot on the heels of using a PIC with a PS/2 keyboard so now might be the time to start digging out your old peripherals out of your junk pile. [David] began his [...]

[alanamon] had an old pinball machine in his basement, and thought it would be cool to rig it up to serve as a clock as well. He didn’t want it to be just any clock however, he wanted the pinball machine to be the most accurate clock in his house. Other than telling time using [...]

[Tobie] seems to have a bit of a rat problem. While most people would be inclined to simply buy the oversized Victor spring-loaded rat traps and call it a day, [Tobie] is a bit more humane. To help remedy his problem while also ensuring that no rats are harmed in the process, he built the [...]

In case you missed them, here are the most popular posts from this past week. Our most popular post is about a hand-made security robot that any good hacker would be proud of. This robot was built by a father-daughter team and has an interesting holonomic drive train that allows it to drive in any [...]

Above you can see Doctor Wily a Chinese hacker starting up one of the propellers on his octocopter. It seems that the man is using a collection of eight motorcycle engines, each with its own wooden propeller to create an eight-bladed helicopter. We were able to locate some video footage of his experiments, which you’ll find [...]

[Parker Dillmann] is nearing the end of the prototyping process for his Propeller development board. He wanted a tool that let him work on projects without the need for a bunch of equipment, while still maintaining the ability to extend the hardware when necessary. His last dev board used a large piece of protoboard to host [...]

[Mathieu] needed to open up his Acer Aspire One to do a hard drive replacement and decided to add a bit of pizzazz while he was in there. The image above is the lid of the netbook adorned with RGB LEDs and a spray painted stencil. He previously purchased a set of surface mount RGB packages on [...]

[Corbin] hates fumbling around in the dark with his alarm blaring, looking for the off switch. He was so annoyed with regular alarm clocks that he decided to build his own simpler timepiece. The FlipClock resides in a simple black plastic case lacking any buttons whatsoever. When the alarm goes off, all one needs to [...]

[magnetovore] made himself an electronic cello. Instead of pulling a few cello samples off of an SD card, he did it the old school analog way. The finished build is really impressive and leaves us wondering why we haven’t seen anything like this before. [magnetovore] uses a permanent magnet to play each ‘string’. A lot [...]

Early last year, [Edward] started work on an aircraft tracking system using components from old electronics he had sitting around the house. As you may or may not know, most modern aircraft continuously broadcast their current position over the 1090MHz band using the ADS-B protocol. [Edward] found that his old satellite receiver module was able [...]

Inductors can be found in many of the devices you use every day, but if you’ve been working only with DC in your projects there’s a good chance you’ve never needed to know anything about them. Now’s your chance to pick up on the basics with this video tutorial series. [Afroman] put together four short [...]

Here’s a wall hanging for the reception area that let’s your customers play retro games while they wait. To give you some sense of scale, the buttons to the right (labeled Start/Jump but we would call them A and B) are arcade buttons larger than traditional arcade buttons. The screen itself is a Samsung widescreen computer [...]

This week’s video is the last in a series of videos where we show how to use Eagle CAD. Today we will look a the Layout portion of the program and will create a circuit board from the schematic that we created previously. We start by creating a layout file and then moving all of [...]

Panning time lapse photographs always look pretty cool, but there’s that whole “making a panning time lapse” rig that gets in the way of all the fun. [Getawaymoments] put together a tutorial quite a while ago showing how to use Ikea egg timers as cheap and dispensable panning units, and has updated his instructions with [...]

[Hunter’s] wife came home from her latest extreme couponing session with a handful of free Air Wick Odor Detect air fresheners, and since they had so many of the things sitting around, he was compelled to take one apart to see what makes them tick. The casing was secured with melted snap tabs which had [...]

Although we’ve featured many chicken-related hacks here, this chicken coop features a solar-powered door to save one from having to open up the coop in the morning.  As [chrisatronics] puts it “keeping chickens has one major drawback: You have to get up with them in the early morning and open the door at the coop. [...]

[peter] send in a reprappable laser cutter that he’s been working on. Even though he’s still having some problems with the accuracy of the beam over the entire square meter bed, it’s still an amazing build. The build started off with a bunch of t-slot aluminum extrusions. After taking delivery of an absurdly large package [...]

[Dino] is back with another installment of his Hack a Week series, and in this episode he is taking on what he promises will be the last transistor-based project – at least for a little while. In the video embedded below, he shows off a homemade voltage detector circuit that he constructed using a trio [...]

[Privatier] wrote in to let us know about lxardoscope, his project that lets you use an Arduino as hardware input for a Linux-based oscilloscope display. This implementation offers two channels with about 3000 samples per second from each. He touts some of the GUI options like vertical resolution between 2mV and 10V per division. That part [...]

[Trax] needed an LC meter and decided to use a tried-and-true design to build his own. The only problem was that he didn’t want to be tied to a bench supply or power outlet, which meant a bit of auxiliary design was in order. What he came up with is the battery-powered LC meter you [...]

Take the risk of not recovering your hardware out of a near-space camera launch by streaming the data during flight. [Tim Zaman] is part of a team that developed the rig seen above. It sent 119 image back during the recent balloon launch. This included transmissions from as high as 36 kilometers. The main hardware [...]

While [Bremster] likes the view from his office window, he often needs to get up and adjust the blinds several times throughout the day in order to keep the glare from killing his eyes. Like any other enterprising hacker, he decided that constantly adjusting them was too repetitive, and that he could automate the process [...]

One of the first things that [Eric] hacked together when he got to college was an RFID door locking system. He found that he was often in a rush to get in and out of his dorm room, and that using a simple wireless key was a great way to streamline his days. Over the [...]

The Arduino folks took advantage of Maker Faire New York to announce their new line of products. There’s several interesting new additions to their product line. They’ve got a WiFi shield in the works that utilizes a module from H&D Wireless in conjunction with an AVR32 processor to take the workload off of the ATmega [...]

[Chris Williamson] designed the Rave Rover, a mobile disco floor with integrated stripper pole for this year’s DragonCon. [Chris] started building combat robots back in 2000 for Battlebots and Robot Wars and cofounded the South Eastern Combat Robot league. He’s a lover and not a fighter, so for the DragonCon robotics track [Chris] built his [...]

[Alex], aka [Grovenstien] turned 30 this weekend. After a conversation with his sister, where she asked: “what was that website with the skull that you always look at?”, he thought maybe he’d get a sticker or a shirt. She surprised him with this totally awesome birthday cake! There really aren’t any build details, but you [...]

Like many Xbox 360s out there, [Aaron’s] console succumbed to the dreaded three red lights of death. Since it seemed to be unrepairable, there wasn’t a lot that could be done with it other than throw it out. Rather than be wasteful however, [Aaron] thought of a great way to reuse the console’s outer shell. [...]

This little beast is named Mechatron. Built by a father/daughter team called Beatty Robotics, the goal was to build something “retro-futuristic, tough, and industrial”. We think they definitely pulled off some of their goals here. Weighing in at nearly 50 pounds, Mechatron is still very agile, as you can see in the video below. He [...]

At [mkanoap’s] office, they have a software package that monitors their various servers’ health, but they wanted a separate indicator to display the status of their most critical systems. They put together a simple list of criteria for their display, including the ability to view the status without a computer, and that it share the [...]

In case you missed them, here are our most popular posts from the past week. Our most popular post from the past week was one where we show a project where [Linas] built his own CT scanner and then used those scans to create 3D models. Our next most popular post was an Engine Hack [...]

[Dan’s] office is awfully hot, but he needed some real temperature numbers that he could show the building management office to justify opening a maintenance ticket. He had seen some simple temperature probe examples online, and decided to build his own using a small AVR chip. Based off a similar temperature monitoring example called EasyLogger, [...]

With fall approaching you might think about moving your gardening inside. [Jared] used cheap and readily available materials to make these salad-green trays.  When used with his grow lights and tent (which he built during a different project) he was able go from seed to salad-bowl in just four weeks. A pair of plastic storage [...]

[Steve] over at Big Mess O’ Wires has never been so happy to see the “Sad Mac” icon. A little over a month ago, he decided to take on the task of building his own Mac clone using modern technology. Not to be confused with Mac emulation on modern hardware, he is attempting to build [...]

[Larry] and [Carol] just upgraded the coop to make their lives easier, and to help keep the chickens happy. The image above is a chicken’s-eye-view of the newly installed automatic door. It’s a guillotine design that uses the weight of the aluminum plate door to make sure predators can’t get in at night. This is [...]

The Swap-O-Matic is vending machine built for recycling, not consuming. Instead of feeding money into the machine, you can get an item out of the machine by swapping it for something you don’t need anymore. It’s a great concept with a great retro design, probably influenced by the age of the automat. [Lina Fenequito] and [...]

[Mike Field] took what he had learned with a few past projects and combined them to make this FPGA-based SPDIF audio pass-through. In order to get the SPDIF signal ready for the FPGA he needed a few components to use for level conversion. Once everything was connected he used a first in first out (FIFO) buffer [...]

Open-source Mars rover [Seth King] wasn’t satisfied with current robotics platforms that don’t work well outdoors. He started the Open Rover Kickstarter with the end goal of having a 6-wheel robot with a rocker-bogie suspension just like the Mars landers. We’re sure it’ll be an interesting platform. Adding a Flash to a key fob video [...]

Do you have a rooted Android device and a computer running Linux? If so, you’re already on your way to coding for Android in Assembly. Android devices use ARM processors, and [Vikram] makes the argument that ARM provides the least-complicated Assembly platform, making it a great choice for those new to Assembly programming. We think [...]

[Mark] wrote in to share a little creation that he is calling the first solar-powered 3D printer in existence. While we can’t say that we totally agree with him on that title, we will give him the benefit of the doubt that this is the first solar-powered RepRap we have seen thus far. You might [...]

[Aurelio] wrote in to tell us about the smartCaster, an “Open source automatic roto-casting machine.”  For those of you not familiar with roto-casting, or rotational molding, it’s a process whereby something to be formed is placed into a mold and then melted while spinning.  This item is often plastic, but it can be another material [...]