DIY Hacks

Space Station Lamp

    If you want to be notified whenever the Space Station is flying overhead this Space Station Lamp project by Nathan from Mechanical Integrator is sure to help out. A number of LEDs edge light a piece of frosted plexiglass and a Teensy microcontroller does the work. Some Python code is used to check to see when the Space Station is over head. If you are interested in making

Jeremy Blum Remote Controlled Graduation Cap

    Congrats to Jeremy Blum for graduating from Cornell University! He made a cool Remote Controlled Graduation Cap that he controls using a custom built wrist control box. The cap has an RGB LED in it and is capable of not only grabbing user submitted color suggestions but also a variety of pre-programmed ones. If you would like to see how it works Jeremy has made it open source

Animatronic Singing Robot Project

    Thanks to Vigo for sending in his latest project. It’s a Animatronic Singing Robot! The mechanism is quite simple but the results are fantastic. I can just imagine using this for a phone call that is video recorded at one end, you could have the puppet move it’s mouth to the speech of the other person and have a full conversation with the puppet. “What is Animatronic Beaker-bot? Well,

1937 Philips AM Radio Hacked into an iPhone Dock

  Oyvind from Build Electronic Circuits sent in his latest project. It’s a 1937 Philips AM Radio Hacked into an iPhone Dock, the project is basically using the nice old housing since all of the internals were discarded. He is using a module that the iPhone plugs into to grab the audio line out from the phone which is fed into the a small amp. A newer speaker was installed since

Alert Tube - Monitor anything on the Net

     If you are tied to your cell phone to monitor weather, calendar events and stocks, the Alert Tube could be the next gadget you need. Michael Watson built is around a Raspberry Pi, it monitors the net for events that you choose and alerts you by light patterns, text to speech or sounds. You can see the entire project build details here. “The Alert Tube is an open

DIY Laser Engraver

    If you have some old donated scanners and printers chances are you have most of the stuff needed to make your own DIY Laser Engraver. The main thing that all laser engravers have in common is a method of moving a laser or set of mirrors in an X Y pattern. Scanners and printers have motors and rails that can allow for accurate motion so all that is

Hand Tracking Pong

    For this Cornell ECE 5760 Hand Tracking Pong project Hanting Lu and Kedari Elety have connected a camera to an FPGA, the image is down sampled so that it is only looking at a 40 X 30 image to determine how the players are moving. “The NTSC video signal from the camera is stored in the SDRAM at the rate of the TV Decoder Line clock (TD_CLK). Data