The Ben Heck Show has a cool DIY Animatronic Puppet Head project. This project listens for speech and moves the puppet mouth accordingly.  “In this episode Ben sets out to help Backflip films with their upcoming puppet movie The Princess Knight. The film requires its actors to memorize prerecorded dialogue in order to match it with the mouth of a puppet. In this episode Ben sets out to create an animatronic
The prize this week is a HMC5883L Triple Axis Compass Magnetometer Sensor so you can add some directionality to your next project. This contest will run for one week (April 19- 24, 2015). Ending time is based on central standard time. To enter, identify the item above and what it can be used for. Please do not give the answer in the comments. Send an email to contest @
 The BB8 Robot looks amazing, there is a lot of discussion how it is done. My bet is that there is a heavy drive mechanism in the marge sphere with an arm that can turn and tilt, This is them magnetically coupled to the top piece which simply sits on wheels.
 Antonin Martin-Schouler had created a nice POV Globe. IR is used for position detection, a slip ring gets power over to the globe, it is packing some serious processing power with the ARM processor running the show. “For building the device using this tutorial, you’ll need the following material: The Zybo board from Digilent The Neopixel LED strip from Adafruit A 12 wires slip ring like this one
Language Warning on this video by AvE. If some swear words turn you off this video isn’t for you. This is the type of project that could come in handy when you find yourself stuck in the bush with no stores in site. We are shown how to use the resistive properties of the pencil lead to act as a voltage divider and drop the voltage to a save level for
Dave take a close look at Thin Film Resistor Networks. These are used in various precision electronic gear where extreme precision is needed. This one is from a Keithley DMM7510 7.5 Digit Multimeter and is stamped Fluke, I didn’t now that both companies were owned by Danaher. You may have seen a similar resistor trimming design on a large scale if you have ever purchased a high current monitor
The prize this week is a HMC5883L Triple Axis Compass Magnetometer Sensor so you can add some directionality to your next project. This contest will run for one week (April  12- 17, 2015). Ending time is based on central standard time. To enter, identify the item above and what it can be used for. Please do not give the answer in the comments. Send an email to contest @ hackedgadgets.com with
