This project goes to show that with a bit of imagination you can create some very cool things with off the shelf components. The guys from ADNANONLINE have done. By moving your body around you can control the toy RC car. The Kinect is watching the movement, information is then sent to an Arduino so that the real world control of the RC car is possible. “RC Car controlled by
If you are dealing with LiPo batteries it is wise to use some commercial built charger since they have some special charging needs which is harder to pull off with a dead simple circuit like we could do with NiCad cells for example. Dane had one of these special charging units but has now hacked it to allow him to stream out the serial data from the unit so he
The prize this week is a mini tripod to help you get some great pictures of your next project. This contest will run for one week (July 23 – 29, 2011). Ending time is based on central standard time. To enter, identify the item pictured above. Please do not give the answer in the comments. Send an email to contest @ hackedgadgets.com with “Name the Thing Contest” as the subject,
Next time you are working on a laser project that needs a small DC motor or a robot arm that is in need of a few gears make sure you have a copy of Unscrewed by Ed Sobey handy. Most of us makers and hackers have a large pile of used parts (some call them junk boxes), they come in all shapes and forms, old VCRs that got retired, the
If you are also sad at the death of the Google Power Meter have a look at this Pic Power Meter project over at Pyrofer’s Projects. “The Pic board counts rotations of the disc in 1 minute increments. Every ten minutes it connects to the server over serial (to ethernet UDP) and uploads all ten readings The server saves these into a mysql database. I wrote some PHP code to
Stynus saw the Drill Battery Charger Repair article and sent in his drill repair to Make a Cordless Drill with a Dead Battery a Corded Drill. In his case he had a battery for his Bosch cordless drill die and with the cost of a replacement being so high he decided to adapt the drill into a corded drill for bench work. He still has the ability to use it
Before you toss your broken tools in the trash it’s worth a bit of time to see if it’s repairable. In a day when even the manufacturer just replaces boards and doesn’t actually troubleshoot and repair their own equipment it can be a bit tricky though. In the not so distant past you could find lots of schematics inside the back cover of user manuals that came with electronics, those
