After a motorcycle accident that cost him is arm [Martin] and his son [Luke] chose not to give up. They used their considerable mechanical skills to create a replacement robotic arm which allowed Martin to start doing some of the simple things he had been unable to do with the prosthetic he was originally fitted [...]

Although this isn’t the first pneumatic air cannon to be featured on HAD, this “paintball shotgun” is certainly one of the coolest.  While most air cannons have little practical use besides looking awesome and being cool to play with, this cannon, according to it’s maker, has actually been used successfully in actual paintball competition. The [...]

While many people would be satisfied leaving a MAME console on their desk, others take the time to put their MAME creations in a nice, authentic arcade cabinet. Some people like [Simon Jansen] take the craft to a whole new level, crafting a TARDIS from the ground up in order to house a MAME console. [...]

[Shingo Hisakawa] sent in a tip for a for a neat little box called the Levistone that tracks the Internation Space Station with a laser. His video log goes though all the steps for this great little project. [Shingo] originally planned to pull orbital data down from NORAD and send that to an ArduinoBT board [...]

While some people can rely solely on memory and landmarks to find their way home, others need a bit more help. Consider Instructables user [_macke_] for instance. Like other screenless GPS navigation devices we have seen, his “Find Home Detector” uses a GPS module to obtain his location, guiding the way home via a set [...]

We’re always fascinated by flying drones around here, and this latest creation by Japan’s Ministry of Defense is no exception. The spherical drone, which looks far simpler than this drone we saw several months back, looks pretty benign at first glance. Once it starts moving however, you can see just how slick it is. Reports [...]

The image above is a screen capture from a video clip where the black ooze gobbles up that rare-earth magnet. It’s actually a blob of Silly Putty which was slightly altered to add magnetic properties. [Mikeasaur] grabbed some ferric iron oxide powder from an art supply store and donned gloves and a dust mask while massaging it [...]

Although virtual reality was the wave of the future in the early 90′s, it hasn’t really taken off the way we would have liked. Sometimes a great idea just takes time for the technology to catch up to it (Aeolipile anyone?). Now that tiny projectors, realistic FPS games, and eye tracking systems have come down [...]

[Nathan Bergey] came up with a really neat desk lamp that provides a visualization of when the International Space Station is overhead. The lamp uses a Teensy board to light a few LEDs on the edge of a piece of plexiglass. Because the orbit of the ISS decays over time, the time that overhead passes [...]

We have seen a few neat Google ADK projects pop up since its announcement a few weeks back, and this one is already on the list of our favorites. YouTube user [chrisjrelliot] has put together a great hack demonstrating the ADK’s power and how easy it can be to control devices in real time with [...]

Paul, as he describes himself, is “a student without a big budget,” which might have been part of the inspiration for this hack .  Paul wanted to see how much time he was spending under the shower each day, so came up with this monitoring device using the ever-awesome Arduino processor and a RFID tag [...]

When notes stuck to the water heater failed [Ryan] decided to whip up “the world’s most expensive 240V relay” using a servo, a real time clock and of course an Arduino. All in an attempt to save a buck or two thanks to LA’s “Time-of-Use program”. Using a protoshield Ryan soldered up a RTC module [...]

Summer has hit, and with it a bunch of crazy people going to crazy festivals and (often) burning crazy sculptures to crazy music! In that vein [Matthew Goodman] recently got involved in the burning flipside community down in Texas for his first big effigy build.  The project called for a gigantic archway flanked by two [...]

[Dillon] just finished his first project of the summer. It’s a volume units meter for his sound system and it has a few tricks up its sleeve. He’s driving the rows of LEDs using an AN6884 LED driver chip. It has an integrated amplifier circuit which makes it the perfect part for building a VU [...]

The next time you reach for a cold one, you might want to take a look at the can to ensure that your beer won’t suddenly sprout legs and start skittering across the table. You might remember [Ron Tajima] from some of his previous creations, including this Roomba-based baby cradle and the PacMan Roomba mod. [...]

While some projects we feature are meant to perform a useful function or make life easier, others such as this art installation by [Pe Lang] are far less functional, but amazing nonetheless. Taking a cue from CNC-style machines, his creation is an experiment in falling objects and the properties of water. The machine methodically moves [...]

For [Roy's] graduate electronics class, he decided to make something that many in and out of the hacking world would certainly love, an automatic espresso loader.  One can choose from three flavors available. In order to accomplish this, a Parralax Propeller board is used to control three servos that regulate the amount of coffee dispensed, [...]

Although there is no shortage of Kinect hacks out there, this one from Dashhacks seems especially cool.  According to them, the software part of this design uses a “modified OpenNI programming along with GlovePIE to send WiiMote commands to the cyborg such as jaw and torso movement along with MorphVOX to create the voice for [...]

[Carlos Agell] sent in a tip where he captured images from an analog camera with an Arduino. We’ve seen a few AVR/Arduino hacks that generate video, although overclocking is necessary if you want to do anything beyond a Breakout clone. [Carlos]‘ hack bucks that trend and now he can capture video with an Arduino. The [...]

While we’re all for building circuits on protoboard or constructing a deadbug circuit for a last minute project, it’s always nice to see a proper PCB now and again. We think that leftover flux can sometimes make even the nicest of circuit boards look a bit dingy, and Hackaday reader [RandomTask] wholeheartedly agrees. He wrote [...]

The Open Hardware Summit is gearing up for their second annual conference, which is to be held on September 15th, 2011 in New York City. The summit aims to be a venue where users can present, discuss, and learn about open hardware of all kinds. Hot on the heels of the Open Hardware definition announcement, [...]

We have seen a few very nice and polished AVR based projects from [Manekinen] over the last few years. Now he has just finished his latest project, the µProg, a super tiny complete AVR programmer with a bunch of features. The µProg completely eliminates the need for a computer to program your embedded AVR chips. [...]

[Stephen Hobley] has been experimenting with an electromagnetic pendulum in order to build himself a clock. Through the course of his experiments, he has learned quite a bit about how pendulums function as well as the best way to keep one moving without the need for chains and weights, which are typically associated with these [...]

Like most of us at Hack a Day, [Bertrand Fan] has a huge collection of digital music that was all obtained through legal channels. Missing the physical process of choosing and playing an album, [Bertrand] built an RFID record player to get rid of the paradox of choice that arises when thousands of albums are [...]

After the electromechanical timer on [Paul Canello's] washing machine broke for the third time he decided he needed to stop repairing it and find a more permanent fix. He decided to build his own microcontroller-based system for washing his clothes (translated). Caution: The image links on [Paul's] page seem to be broken and will unleash a never-ending [...]

[Destin] has been doing some high-speed and high-resolution video photography using a standard DSLR. He accomplishes this using a bit of ingenuity to capture images of repetitive events at slightly different points in time. The banner image above shows a bullet travelling through a set of matchsticks. [Destin] uses the sound of the gun firing [...]

[Grenadier] Had some spare wire, electrical tape, and a giant ferrite core laying about and decided to create a massive and pretty snappy looking disk shaped flyback transformer. Dubbed the Fryback, he claims that it will “revitalise your health and bring wondrous wealth and prosperity to your family”. He chose a disk shaped transformer because [...]

Necessity is the mother of invention, or so they say. [Jason] was in such a situation where he needed to install some safety railing at his grandmother’s house. He didn’t have the necessary tools available, like a drill, so he fashioned one himself out of a pencil sharpener and some fittings and wire that he [...]

Looking for an underwater camera setup, [Imsolidstate] picked up a Canon A70 and a Canon water-tight housing on eBay for around $45. Unfortunately the camera arrived with a non-functioning CCD. Another trip to the online auction site landed him a replacement CCD which he set about installing. We have this exact model of camera with [...]

[Ben Krasnow] wanted to upgrade his shop lighting but before he made any decisions he decided to educate himself about the options that are out there. Luck for us, he shares the facts about different lighting in terms of cost and efficiency. His old setup uses fluorescent light fixtures with T12 bulbs. These are rather bulky and inefficient bulbs. [...]

2600, the magazine familiar to many as a preeminent hacking quarterly, is publishing a calendar. While, according to the 2600 site, most calendars only mark holidays, 2600 intends to “provide as complete a guide to milestones in the hacker world as humanly possible.” Not an easy task considering that, depending on your definition, hacking could [...]

While it seems that the digital camera is king, some people still love shooting with good old 35mm film – [Costas Kaounas], a high school teacher and photographer certainly does. He recently published plans for a great-looking 35mm pinhole camera over at DIY photography that we thought you might enjoy. [Costas] put together a set [...]

Who needs a Fluke high voltage detector when you’ve got one of these things? Actually, we still recommend a professional high voltage detector for serious work, but you’ve got to like this electric field detector that [Alessandro] recently put together. The detector works by using a JFET to detect the high impedance electric fields that [...]

[Dino Segovis] wrote in to share yet another installment of his Hack a Week series, though this one is quite timely. It was 131 years ago today that [Alexander Graham Bell] unveiled the Photophone to the world. A precursor to fiber optic technology, [Bell’s] incredibly important invention can be easily replicated in your garage, as [...]

Recently there’s been a increase in the popularity of OpenSCAD as the tool of choice in the 3d printing community. [Gavilan Steinman] is putting out a series of webTV shorts on the use of OpenSCAD. While it lacks a lot of the features of big CAD suits (such as the ability to generate drawings of your [...]

[Mure] wrote in to let us know he has put the finishing touches on the second iteration of his Warm Tube Nixie clock. We featured his original creation here last year, and while many things remain the same, he has still found a few things that he was able to improve on. The first notable [...]

This setup will let you monitor Play Station 3 temperatures and throttle the cooling fan accordingly. [Killerbug666] based the project around an Arduino board, and the majority of the details about his setup are shared as comments in the sketch that he embedded in his post. He installed four thermistors in his PS3 on the CPU [...]

This cube-shaped bot just shattered the robotic Rubik’s Cube solving record by about 8 seconds. It did it in a blazing 10.69 seconds to best the old record of 18.2 seconds. There was immediate confusion here at Hackaday as some of us thought the record was actually around six seconds. And it is, for humans. [...]

If there was a competition for coolest transportation device for the future, the diwheel would be at the top of the list with hover cars and teleportation. Over the past 3 years students at Adelaide University have been working on an Electric Diwheel With Active Rotation Damping or EDWARD. EDWARD is an entirely electric diwheel, [...]

[devb] has been playing around with XESS FPGA boards for ages, and as long as he can remember, they have had built-in VGA interfaces. His newest acquisition, a XuLA FPGA board, doesn’t have any external parts or ports aside from a USB connector. He needed to get video output from the board, so he decided [...]