Joe Grand who you might remember from Prototype This has been working on a Laser Range Finder, he has been nice enough to share his build issues and successes over at the Parallax Forums. He demonstrates how a CMUcam can be used to look at the reflected laser dot to determine range based on triangulation. The Parallax CMUcam he is using looks like it is currently out of stock at
Magnetic Swipe Cards are used everywhere, probably the most common one that we all have in our wallets is the one that is built into our bank and credit cards. Craig from the Flashing LEDs blog was had a reader that was sitting around with no purpose. He swiped his University ID through it and found that the only thing on track 2 was university ID number, this card system
The guys over at Motocross Boards have built some cool looking motorized boards, they remind me of the Wheelman that we saw about 4 years ago but check out this battery operated version! The MXB Shocker has a 1,500-watt, 48-volt brushless DC motor that is capable of pushing the machine to 35 mph. This looks like one amazingly fun ride and when you get to where you need to go
Jee Labs has some interesting modules that can be used as cool building blocks or if you want to build your own based on their ideas you can because all of the design details have been released. This Indoor Temperature, Dewpoint, Humidity and Pressure Monitoring System is a great example of what can be done with a few of these modules.
If you ever wanted to connect your microcontroller project to a VGA monitor this AVR Microcontroller VGA Output project by LucidScience will contain lots of great information. The bare bones part of the project is very interesting to see how little is needed to interface with VGA. A free port and a few resistors and diodes is all that was needed. To generate better quality images read further into the
Oliver Kreylos from UC Davis has built on the hacked Kinect drivers that was released last week. His work is truly amazing and it demonstrates just the start of the possibilities of the Kinect. I can see companies spinning out some new products that build a device that relies on the Kinect as the main data acquisition portion. Just imagine placing someone on a chair and give them a spin in
We have seen what the inside of a Kinect looks like, now we can interface to the cool box if electronic bits. Hector Martin apparently hacked some code together and got it working 3 hours after he got his hands in the Kinect! From what I see this thing has tons of potential. The Wiimote Hacks were being created at a fast and furious pace after it was opened and
