Remember the game Breakout? These days with game controls like the Kinect who wants to use the old style joysticks anymore? ECE 5760 students Meng-Ling (Maxwell) Liu, Thu-Thao Nguyen and Yang Yang designed a game that they call HAND BREAKING BRICKS. They are using an FPGA to display the game on the monitor while it is also monitoring a Terasic CCD module which allows the game to “see” the location
Remember the geeky computer aquariums we featured about 5 years ago? Instead of using a computer case this XBOX 360 Aquarium uses a gaming console case. Thankfully the donor XBOX was a not working, if you think the window cut looks great that is because it was cut out using a waterjet. “The tank itself is made of glass, and is approximately 6″ long, 8″ tall, and 2.5″ wide. Water
This DIY Animated LED Christmas Display is sure to get you in the spirit of Christmas. The sign is built from 134 different colored LEDs, to make this happen some 74HC595 and 74HC14 chips are used. The sign is built to permanently display one message. I am thinking a great upgrade to this project would be to build it with LED matrix boards so it could be used to display
Check out this Useless Machine built with Laser Cut Plywood Hinge. You have probably seen a useless machine before, it is basically a machine that uses a small arm to turn itself off as soon as someone has turned it on. It is a really fun concept. Martin Raynsford has built one in a cool custom case. His case doesn’t use a hinge as you would expect, instead he is
This DIY Camera Crane by Unitips.ca lets you get some amazing video shots and best of all there aren’t any expensive parts needed since the system is based around cheap metal conduit. Watch the video below to see what the results look like and get some build details. There are some spot welded brackets which might be a bit hard to recreate since most of us don’t have a DIY
I am thinking with 7 days still to go this Printrbot Kickstarter has been mildly successful. Of course I am joking, this Kickstarter has been wildly successful! Brook Drumm had a goal of $25,000, the current funding level is a staggering $382,444. 3D printers are really taking off, for example Makerbot recently got $10 million in funding to grow their offerings. But with the price of many 3D printers in
It was a great day when we could start our cold car remotely. A bit of trivia, the first remote car starter was produced by Canadian company here in Winnipeg called Kraus. Times have changed! In this hack Brandon Fiquett uses Siri in his Apple iPhone 4S to command his car to start using voice commands. Lots of the heavy lifting has been done by Viper in this case
