2011 was an interesting year here at Hackaday. We have about 24% more viewers now than we did last year. We started producing our own video content and we have shown some pretty interesting projects in our daily posts. In this post, we are gathering together the best of the best. Our #1 post for [...]

While city engineers were setting up the multicolored ball of lights in Times Square this year, [Phil] at adafruit was busy designing the X2 Time Ball, a disco icosahedron perfect for celebrating the new year. The ball is made of 20 acrylic triangles zip-tied together into an icosahedron. On each face, six RGB pixels light up [...]

Make sure to brush up on your safety protocol if you undertake this project. The penalty for messing up when using live wiring as a radio receiver antenna is rather severe. But after reading about it in some old books [Miroslav] decided to give this technique a try. We love the old-school chalk board he [...]

[Marc Cryan] built this little bugger which he calls Wendell the Robot. But what good is an animatronic piece like this unless you do something fun with it? That’s why you can catch the movements matching [Michael Jackson's] choreography from the music video Thriller in the clip after the break. This is a ground-up build [...]

Lots of people buy noise makers for New Year’s eve, others opt to sing Auld Lang Syne – then there’s these guys. The crew at Stone Brewing Company throw an annual bash at their brewery in celebration of New Years, and while [Dino’s] countdown timer is great for intimate settings, they needed something bigger to [...]

FPGAs are the bee’s knees. Instead of programming a chip by telling it what to do, FPGAs allow you to tell a chip what to be. Like everything though, a new skill set is needed to fully exploit the power of FPGAs. [Mike Field] decided to give back to the internet community at large and put up a [...]

This proof-of-concept is just waiting for you to put it to good use. [Mike Tsao] wrote an Arduino sketch that lets him decode incoming audio data which could be used to program the device. He’s calling the project TribeDuino because it decodes an audio file which is actually the firmware update for a Korg Monotribe. [...]

For camera fanatics the acquisition of an old camera is a thrilling event. But if you’re going to collect them, you’d better have some repair skills so that you can also use them. [Fernando's] latest find was this Minox 35mm camera. The aperture needed cleaning, and after reassembling the unit he realized the he had [...]

Looks like your WiFi might not be quite as secure as you thought it was. A paper recently published by [Stefan Viehböc] details a security flaw in the supposedly robust WPA/WPA2 WiFi security protocol. It’s not actually that protocol which is the culprit, but an in-built feature called Wi-Fi Protected Setup. This is an additional [...]

[Duncan Murdock] received a Canon DSLR camera for Christmas and wanted a remote shutter release to go along with it. Since nary a store was open on Christmas, he was pretty much out of luck. Scrounging around in his parts drawer, he found all sorts of goodies waiting to be reused, including a knockoff Wii [...]

[Bob Alexander] wrote in to share a hobby of his that we thought was pretty timely considering the new year is quickly approaching. For several years now he has put together a custom calendar for himself, including both dates he finds important along with sweet pictures of vintage computer equipment. Friends and family found his [...]

When a few lights in the dashboard of  [Garrett]‘s truck burned out, he was looking at a hefty repair bill. The repair shop would have to replace the huge PCB to change a few soldered light bulbs, so he was looking at a $500 repair bill. Lighting up a LED is everyone’s first project, so [...]

[Johnie] built himself a CNC woodburner powered by the sun. Like the solar 3D printer we saw last summer, [Johnie]‘s build uses a giant Fresnel lens to focus sunlight onto a piece of wood. To get some control out of his build, a 2-axis bed was made from scrounged and junked parts. The lens in [...]

[David] sent in a nice project to demonstrate augmented reality with ARtoolkit and discuss the deep philosophical underpinnings of the meaning of nothingness. The good news is he was able to create a volume control button on a sheet of paper with a marker. The bad news is the philosophical treatment is a bit weak; [...]

It looks like Null Space Labs has a new pick and place machine. This immense repair job began when [Charliex] and [Gleep] found a JukiPlacemat 360 pick and place machine. The idea of having their very own pick and place machine proved intoxicating, possibly too much so because the didn’t return the machine when they found out [...]

[Ytai Ben-Tsvi] wrote in to share a little holiday project that he and friend [Al Linke] put together, a dynamic light display that takes its cues from his Android-powered smartphone. The display fits in a vase that sits in [Ytai’s] family room, and while it wasn’t exactly cheap to build, it sure looks nice. The [...]

Tweet Receiving, that is. This Ewok model, named “Ewen the Cheerlight,” is able to rotate it’s head left and right as well as show expressions. The most interesting feature of this hack, however, is that the little Ewok actually wakes up each time one tweets a “colour” to @cheerlights and lets it’s owner [Joel] know [...]

[Thomas Clauser] had his basement flood last year when a hurricane swept over New England. The problem with flooding or leaking water is that chances are you won’t notice until it’s too late. He decided to protect against this in the future by building his own leaking water detector. It’s a simple device that sits [...]

[Chris'] family made the mistake of giving him a hackable Christmas gift. We’d bet they didn’t see much of him for the rest of the day as he set about rooting this Android wristwatch. This thing has some pretty powerful hardware under the hood. It’s sporting an OMAP3 processor running at 600 MHz along with [...]

The only problem with this self-balancing unicycle is it’s inability to balance itself. You see, it automatically balances along the axis that is parallel to the line of travel. But since there’s only one wheel the rider is responsible for balancing perpendicular to travel. This is really not too much different from a bicycle; balancing while in [...]

We’re guessing that if you ever though of buying an arcade cabinet it was only briefly, and you decided against based on the difficulties of moving and finding a place for such a large and heavy item. You could go the opposite way and build a controller for a  MAME box, but for some, there’s [...]

There’s not much to be gained by living in a discotheque but colored lights are awesome, especially when they’re as well implemented as [michu]‘s StripInvaders. The StripInvaders project takes a gigantic 5 meter LED strip with WS2801 controllers and turns it into an Ethernet-enabled 24 bit display with the new Arduino Ethernet. While the Ethernet-enabled may seem a [...]

Ammo crate PCs have been around since Unreal Tournament LAN parties, but this one goes further back than that; [Simon] put an Apple II in an ammo crate. It’s a fitting anachronistic build from the same guy that built the TARDIS MAME cabinet. Thankfully, [Simon] didn’t tear apart an Apple IIc for this build. A [...]

[Maximilien] sent in a networking protocol built out of a LEGO train set. Unlike IP over Avian Carrier this system won’t be killed by plate-glass windows or birds of prey, but we’d hate to step on [Max]‘s work in bare feet. The system uses a USB flash drive to carry data around to different nodes. At each node, [...]

[Fezoj] likes to play around with microcontrollers and decided that he wanted to try a Bus Pirate as a new tool in his adventures. Since it’s open hardware he had his own board made and populated it himself. The trouble is, he works only with AVR chips and doesn’t have a PIC programmer. No problem, [...]

[Andrew] shows us one way to reuse all those strands of Christmas lights you used for decoration this year. He had a friend that was helping with stage props for a local musical and ended up using his skills to build a lighted sign with some animation capabilities. The original plan was to cut out [...]

Ah, Christmas. That wonderful time of year when you can roll out of bed to the screams and wails of children, grab a hot cocoa, and spend several hours arguing with an 8-year-old about which LEGO set to build first. Simply magical. While you’re waiting for the Doctor Who Christmas special to come on, settle [...]

Apparently a Braille computer display can cost several thousand dollars. That’s why [David Pankhurst] is working on a low-cost alternative. His offering is an open source version he calls the Audrey Braille Display. The concept is quite good. This prototype has one line of six Braille characters. Each character is made of two sliding strips [...]

We don’t know why, but the Atari Jaguar is getting a lot of attention this week. [10P6] just came up with this Jaguar/CD combo that reminds us what Atari could have come up with in 1993. The build itself is relatively simple once you get past [kevincal]‘s ‘April Fools’ type joke he played on the Atari [...]

Depending on the scope of your requirements, Power over Ethernet (PoE) components can get pretty pricey. [Fire] wrote in to share a 4-port PoE solution he put together for under 20 euros (Ignore any SSL errors – we’ve checked it out, it’s safe). The most expensive part of the build was the 8-port patch panel he [...]

Chiptunes are great, and we can’t imagine a world without the Mega Man 2 soundtrack, but sometimes we all like a more 70′s style synth. This is where the Roninsynth steps in. It’s an Arduino shield that puts the basic components of a wall of synth into your pocket. Unlike the analog oscillators of yore, the Roninsynth [...]

[Scot Kornak] got his hands on the new STM32 Discovery Board. He got his as a free giveaway, but at only $18 he probably would have picked one up anyway. His one complaint about the device is that he dual pin-headers which break out the ARM processor’s pins are not the most convenient for hooking [...]

[Allan] needed a small vacuum chamber to get all the air out of clear casting resin. Degassing is a simple step in casting that improves the finished product immensely. The problem, though, is building a vacuum chamber. [Allan]‘s chamber seems easy enough to build, and pulls enough air out to get to 0.1 atmospheres. After [...]

[Matt Keeter] wanted to take his music on the go, and wrote in to share a great looking boombox he built for under $100. His goal was to put something together that could be made in pretty much any hackerspace/fab lab, so his boombox was made using simple materials. He first modeled the boombox using [...]

This animated LED buckyball has little to do with modeling a carbon molecule but a lot to do with adding some excitement to your party decor. [Tim] felt that the LED cube hacks had run their course, so took on the challenge of a sphere made out of pentagonal and hexagonal components instead. As with [...]

[Ed] is pretty old school. He loves the functionality of old industrial shop tools that have their own dedicated systems. With huge candy-like buttons, who wouldn’t? [Ed] decided to replicate this aesthetic by building a MAME controller for his Mach3 controlled router. [Ed] had a bunch of MAME buttons and joysticks sitting around from a forgotten [...]

[Thadd Brooks] is a geeky dad of the highest degree. His kids are constantly trying to figure out what mom and dad bought them for Christmas, while he continues to think up ways to stymie their progress. He certainly could have put a few prank presents under the tree, but he opted to go a [...]

Prolific Hack a Day author [Mike S] has been playing in his lab again and he’s come up with a neat way to talk to microcontrollers with an LCD monitor. The basic idea behind [Mike]‘s work isn’t much different from the weird and/or cool Timex Datalink watch from the 1990s. Despite the fancy dev board, the [...]

Maybe we’re a little bitter because we held on to our pumpkin futures well into November, but we’ve got to respect [Nick]‘s stock ticker ornament. It’s an Internet-connected Christmas ornament that queries stock prices and displays the change with an RGB LED. The build uses a Propeller Platform USB and the Propeller E-Net Module to pull stock [...]