Educational

FPGA Breakout Game played by moving your Hands - HAND BREAKING BRICKS

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

FPGA Conway's Game of Life

If you have taken some CS courses you have no doubt seen Conway’s Game of Life, if you are a kit builder you have probably seen some nice Conway’s Game of Life kits also. Where the basic kit version has 16 elements Cornell University student Cooper Bills wanted to design a system that had 307,200 elements. What this boils down to is an incredible looking visual effect that requires a

Intro to Electronic Schematics

Collin Cunningham from Make gives a good introduction to what an electronic schematic is and how to properly read them. You can read more about schematics here, to see lots of practical examples this is a good start. “Schematics are the functional diagram of electronic circuits. With so many designs available on the web, understanding how to read schematics can unlock a world of possibilities for the electronics maker”

Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to Dan Shechtman

In the latest Solid State Technology magazine there is a great article about the Nobel Prize in chemistry being awarded being awarded to Dan Shechtman. Subscribing to the Solid State Technology magazine is free as long as you are in USA, if you are outside the USA you can subscribe to the digital version. Hacked Gadgets does receive a small payment for each subscription to any of our Free Magazine Subscriptions

Solar Pop Can Heater System Build Roundup

Solar Pop Can Heating Systems are getting quite popular these days. As heating costs rise everyone is looking for ways to save on their energy bill. Most people are aware of insulating and using good weatherstripping to keep the heat in and the cold out but many don’t know about the alternate heating methods that are available. One of the alternative heating methods that is gaining some traction is capturing

Eyeboard - Allows your Eyes to be used as a Computer Interface

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

Delta Robot with Vision

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