The Open 7400 Competition is over and the winner is…. Capacitive Sensing, the Hard Way! This is a project that is somewhat simple when done with a microcontroller but takes quite a bit of effort to pull off with 7400 chips. I think the winners are still trying to determine who wants what since I haven’t heard who is going to be awarded the three IR Jammer kits yet. “The
Luis Cruz just graduated from high school but don’t let his young age fool you, he is already developing some very serious systems. His low cost eye tracking system uses Electrooculography to detect the movements of a person’s eyes. This then allows a person to control an electronic or computer system just by looking around. He has also received some CNN coverage, see the CNN video below. Read about the
I was just catching up on some episodes of The Amp Hour and heard about this DIY Pick and Place Machine by Build Your Own CNC Router Machine. I love the fact that the entire thing has been constructed from everyday items. It isn’t the fastest thing but I love machines that you can program and walk away and get something else done while it completes the task. If you
Henrique Ribeiro de Oliveira from Brazil and two others have built this great Delta Robot with Vision. Best of all it is running a cool program to show off what it is capable of. You can toss some tokens randomly on the board, the robot will locate the tokens and place them on some colored dots in the middle of the working surface. Via: Hacked Gadgets Forum “We used Labview
Remember the days when floppy drives were all the rage. Well I don’t miss those slow noisy things, it’s hard to believe that a large floppy was one that held 1.44MB of data. You would need 10 of them to store a modern picture these days! Thankfully there is still a use for these relics, you can connect them to a custom microcontroller and have it play some music using
I have done quite a bit of CNC work with MDF but I didn’t know it could be carved with normal wood working tools this nicely. Andrew Espie-Whitburn from Espie Whitburn Design created this Wood Carved Computer Case over a period of 20 days and it looks great!
Interacting with your project can be as simple as hooking up an IO pin to a button but if you need greater capability it might be time for a keyboard. In this tutorial Chris from PyroElectro demonstrates how to connect a PIC microcontroller to a PS/2 keyboard. One issue these days is finding a PS/2 keyboard, thankfully before USB came around they were a standard for a long time so
