Imagitronics from Japan shared his latest creation with us in the Hacked Gadgets forum. It’s a USB Controlled Traffic Light Status Indicator which he built to show the number of running applications at a glance. “I retrofitted this generic “Blinking Traffic Light†with a USB module and wrote a simple Mac application to monitor my computer usage and reflect the results in by changing the stoplight. This project was born
John from The Hacker’s Bench has put together a selection of crazy clocks, this water clock that is located in Kanazawa Station is my favorite. It uses jets of water to either display the time or messages. If you know where we can find some more details of the build I would love to hear from you. Make sure you watch the last 5 seconds of the video to see
Robots make our life easy. They perform repetitive tasks for us without complaining. If I only had an industrial robot laying around that I could convert into a beer opener! Have a look at the Hacked Gadgets top picks of Beer Robots. What is your favorite?
This Paper Rocket Kit looks like fun, just print and build! “Still looking for something to shoot into the sky on new year eve? Here it is: Build your own little paper rocket – it comes complete with a pneumatic launch pad. Using pressurized air as it’s only fuel, the rocket might rise as high as five meters. No fire and no explosives are used – it’s perfectly safe for
Check out this Computer Controlled Room Ambilight Controller that Mike built. I didn’t realize that there was an open source program that would perform the same screen analysis as the Phillips Ambilight system, this gives me some ideas… Video after the jump. “What it basically does is, it waits for info from the PC through the RS232 interface and then controlls the brightness of the different collors. I then wrote
When building microcontroller projects it’s often desirable to connect them to a computer. Most RS232 computer ports are able to read 0 and 5 volt TTL data levels however there are some computers that require voltage levels that are closer to the true RS232 spec. Most people use a MAX 232 chip when there is a need to follow the spec. correctly, but it’s possible to build your own circuit.
Warning, DIY Pneumatic guns can be dangerous. Be very careful if you attempt to build your own.
