[Paul] wrote in to share a project he recently helped assemble, a huge rolling light sculpture with a ton of computer-controlled EL wire circuits. The sculpture recently featured as a float at the Starlight Parade held in Portland, Oregon. Working alongside the folks from Hand Eye Supply, [Paul] helped design and build all 114 of [...]

Forget Microsoft Surface, what do you think about having a 32-inch Android-powered touchscreen display in your living room? That possibility might not be too far off, thanks to the engineers over at SKR Technology in Japan. Primarily a company that designs and builds digital signage, they were approached by several customers who wanted a large [...]

Here’s a fantastic project that lets to drive a hexapod around the room using an RC controller. [YT2095] built the bot after replacing the servo motors on his robot arm during an upgrade. The three cheapies he had left over were just begging for a new project, and he says he got the first proof-of-concept [...]

[TBJ] is building what he calls a junkbox 3D printer. You can probably guess that he’s trying to salvage most of the parts for the device, and after pulling a stepper motor from an old printer he was in need of a way to control it. What he came up with is a stepper driver [...]

The usual way send data from a microcontroller is either over RS-232 with MAX232 serial ICs, crystals, and a relatively ancient computer, or by bit-banging the USB protocol and worrying about driver issues. Not content with these solutions, [Scott] came up with sound card ?C/PC communication that doesn’t require any extra components. [Scott] bought a [...]

Here is an example of what happens when someone is tempted to use their hacking skills for evil. Hopefully it goes without saying, but do NOT try this one at home. When his wife asked for a divorce [Andrew Castle] obviously did not like the idea so got busy building himself a DIY electric chair, [...]

  [Rob] Was cleaning out his car hole when he stumbled across a servo, a PC cooling fan, an Arduino and apparently a whole lot of bubble mixture. With all of this, some scrap timber and a few trips to the dollar store, he was able to whip up this bubble blowing bot to entertain his [...]

A week or so ago we featured an FPGA MIDI interface. Since then the builder has gone crazy with his FPGA and revised his code to include polyphony and PWM output, and posted a polyphony demo. In our previous coverage of the build, the synth was monophonic, and the MIDI implementation was pretty shaky. After [...]

[Milosch] wrote in to tell us that he has recently released a bootable RFID live hacking system – something he has been diligently working on for quite some time. The live distro can be used for breaking and analyzing MIFARE RFID cards, as well as a reasonable selection of other well-known card formats. The release [...]

Bradley University grad student [Curtis Boirum] has built a robot which uses quite a unique drive system, one we’re guessing you have never seen before. The robot uses a single motor to drive its hemispherical omnidirectional gimbaled wheel, propelling it across the floor at amazing speeds with uncanny agility. The robot uses a simple two [...]

[Peter Brinkman] is working on a circuit that makes it easy to interface MIDI and Bluetooth devices. His target hardware has been a MIDI compatible keyboard and an Android phone. He was inspired to tip us off about the project after reading about yesterday’s Bluescripts project. We’ve embedded two demo videos after the break. They [...]

The Broadband Internet Service BenchMARK is an open source initiative to put tools in the hands of the common Internet user that will make measurement and analyzation of home network traffic easier. It targets LAN and WAN network utilization by measuring latency, packet loss, jitter, upstream throughput, and downstream throughput. Of course gathering data isn’t [...]

[Ko] wanted to add an extra monitor to his computer, but he wasn’t looking for something huge that would sit atop his desk – he desired something smaller, much smaller. His ChibiMo mini USB monitor is a neat little creation that lets you extend or mirror your Windows desktop onto a tiny 128×64 pixel LCD [...]

[PJ Allen] built a meter to display gravitation force in an easy to read way. Good thing it’s easy to read, because he’s added it to the dashboard of his car. That way he gets instant feedback when he puts the pedal to the metal. We’re hoping this encourages safe driving practices. But since it [...]

A while ago when he was working in China, [Phillip Torrone] started learning Mandarin Chinese in order to help him communicate more efficiently with his peers. Unfortunately, once he returned to the US, he slowly started forgetting most of what he had learned. He recently wrote a piece over at Make: explaining why he’s attempting [...]

Here’s a way to gain control of your projects using an Android device. Bluescripts is a free app available in the Android market that makes it a bit easier to make interfaces to send customizable messages. If you have a Bluetooth receiver in your project, connecting to it is as easy as putting the MAC [...]

[Cody Sumter] and [Jason Boggess] are students at the MIT Media Lab, and they just came up with Minecraft.Print(), an attempt to create a bridge between Minecraft and the real world via 3D Printers. The print is first prepared by placing obsidian, diamond, gold, and iron blocks on opposite corners of the model in Minecraft. [...]

[Sebastian Steppeler] has been hard at work on his optical sensors for an electric piano. When we looked in on the project back in October he was testing reflective sensors to increase responsiveness and MIDI data resolution for his electric keyboard. Since then he’s finalized the sensor circuits and produced enough boards to monitor all [...]

[Bogdan] sent in a great build of a delta robot he originally posted on the Arduino forum, but he didn’t receive much feedback there. We think a build like this deserves a lot more credit. After working for 7 months on his robot, [Bogdan] has a pretty stable (and very classy) platform made out of [...]

The crew over at the HarfordHackerspace used their wits and creativity to land a spot at the final round of Red Bull’s Creation challenge. The team arrived in Brooklyn just yesterday, ready to take on all comers in the 72-hour hacking challenge which kicked off earlier this morning. Like any other hacker convention, the Red [...]

[Arthur Benemann] started a little project for his electrical engineering program, and suffered the worst case of feature creep we’ve ever seen. He just posted an instructable of his picChess project that is able to play chess on a VGA monitor with a keyboard, with sound, a clock, temperature sensor. Apparently, [Arthur] was bored one [...]

[Clover] loves plant biology, and tends a small garden while she is at home during breaks from college. She says that her family is notoriously unreliable when it comes to caring for plants, so she decided to construct a greenhouse to ensure that her garden will still be around the next time she comes home. [...]

The Parallax Propeller is a pretty powerful MCU as [Dino] recently discovered in his latest Hack a Week installment. He wanted to build a simple robotics platform that he could use for testing out various sensors, and he figured he might as well learn about a different type of micro controller in the process. He [...]

Meet MBLed, a set of interactive 8×8 LED tiles. Put them next to each other and they will orient themselves into a video screen which is the sum of the parts. If this sounds familiar it’s because we’ve seen the concept before in the GLiP project. [Guillaume] tells us that MB Led is the new [...]

There is a plethora of electronics tutorials scattered about online. Sometimes it can be hard to separate the good ones from the bad, and the enlightening from the misinformed. We recently came across a pair that we found helpful, and thought they would appeal to anyone starting off in electronics. In this video tutorial, [Dave [...]

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s…. A flying RC super hero? No, you’re not imagining things. Maker [Greg Tanous] loves both RC airplanes and super heroes, so he thought it would be awesome to combine his two loves into one spectacular toy. The RCSuperhero comes in two flavors, measuring 75″ and 57″ tall. The [...]

The team over at the Flying Machine Arena has been busy combining two of our favorite toys – quadrotors and Kinect. Like many other hacks, they are using Kinect to monitor their joint positions, mapping a handful of actions to the operator’s movements. Once the quadrotor is aloft, it can be directed around the room [...]

[Jeff] sent in a build of a voice controlled robot he just finished based on the Android ADK and an iRobot Create. The robot is able to obey voice commands telling it where to go. Currently the robot responds to forward, reverse, left, right, stop, and ‘whistle while you work.’ It’s a creative use of [...]

Instructables user [rog8811] was looking to build a fog horn that resembled hand-pumped units found on small ships in the early to mid 1900s. His budget was a bit limited, so he set off to build the cheapest replica possible. While the original horns were likely constructed from steel, copper and wood, he opted to [...]

Oversleeping sucks, but we’ve all been there. Whether its a matter of hitting the snooze button a dozen times too many, or turning off the alarm and drifting back to sleep – sooner or later, you are going to wake up late. Instructables user [nolte919] has overslept a time or two in his life, and [...]

The team at nonolith labs announced their CEE, a device for billed as, “an analog buspirate” that is meant to control, experiment, and explore the world of analog electronics. Nonolith labs started a kickstarter campaign for the CEE. The CEE is capable of sub-millivolt and milliamp sampling at 44.1k samples/second, and sourcing 2 channels of [...]

It’s a holiday weekend, and much like you, we’re taking a bit of time to relax and kick back a few drinks while we mingle with friends and family. Obviously, one of the bigger events this weekend plays host to is the fireworks show put on by your city or your drunken neighbors. Roman candle [...]

The team at Monobanda have been working on a sandbox game called Mimicry that uses a Kinect to read the terrain of a sandbox. From the teaser video and press release, the eventual goal appears to be controlling both a character in the game and the environment simultaneously. By reading the terrain of the sandbox [...]

[Henrique] wrote in to tell us about his time-lapse photography hack. Triggering of the camera is done via CHDK, or Canon Hack Development kit. This experimental kit allows Canon Powershot cameras to run scripts as well as other neat features without permanently changing anything. User scripts for this hack and others can be found here. [...]

While quadrotors might just become the killing machines of choice some time in the future, we’re pretty sure it will be awhile before they run amok and wipe humans off the face of the planet, if the following video is any indication. The team over at UPenn’s GRASP Lab film everything they do when it [...]

[Steve Hoefer] is not a huge fan of traditional table lamps, so he set off to build a reading light of his own that was more aesthetically pleasing than the standard fare. He thought it would be pretty appropriate to construct his reading lamp out of a book, and we’re inclined to agree. He stripped [...]

It’s summer in Germany, and [Valentin’s] room was getting hotter than he could handle. Tired of suffering through the heat, and with his always-on PC not helping matters any, he decided that he must do something to supplement his home’s air conditioner. The result of his labor is the single room poor man’s A/C unit [...]

[kgsws] just finished his Game Boy upgrade that allows him to load games from an SD card. Loading a game off an SD card has been done before, but [kgsws] decided to not to use a cartridge-based device. In the end, he threw out all the stops and finished his project by having the Game [...]