Electronic Hacks

Animatronic Eye Mechanism

If I had one of these Animatronic Eye Mechanisms I could put it to good use this Halloween. “In order to make it possible for puppet eyes to be animated a puppet eye mechanism (commonly called an “eye mech”) must be constructed. Some eye mechanisms are manually controlled by the puppeteer’s hand inside a puppet’s head or externally via a cable control, string or lever. Moving puppet eyes can also

Rand McNally GPS Hack

If you can get your hands on a Rand McNally GPS this Rand McNally GPS Hack will show you how to get the serial data out of it. Since these GPS devices are quite old now they should be quite cheap. Does anyone know of a cheaper serial GPS solution? If so please share it with me. 🙂 “Buy a RandMcNally GPS for the Palm III from http://www.randmcnally.com The GPS

Fiber Optic LED Rose Project

If you have ever wanted to play with some fiber optics here is a Fiber Optic LED Rose Project that you could try out. Nice to see some of my LEDs were used to make a cool project! Parts Needed: “Wires, solder, and soldering gun (of course) 1 green led (I used 6000mcd) – Found online 1 red led (6000mcd) – Found online On-Off Switch – (a few bucks at

Face Tracking Hexapod Robot

  Matt Denton of MicroMagic Systems specializes in animatronics for the film industry. Check out the very interesting (creepy) face tracking robot called i.c Hexapod. “i.c. Hexapod interacts with people by following them around. If his gaze is held long enough, he takes a picture and uploads it to a website: hexapodrobot.com” Some additional information (thanks Matt): “The hexapod was my fourth generation robot, and took around 2 weeks to

PIC 12F683 Microcontroller Based Logic Probe

Have a look at this cool PIC 12F683 Microcontroller Based Logic Probe. “The purpose of this device is to test a wire to determine the logic state. Two LEDs show the logic state as either high, low, or high impedance (aka floating). Simply attach the ground probe to any ground connection of the circuit you want to test, then touch the test probe to the signal you want to test.

GPS RS232 Breakout Circuit

Looks like the Holux GM-210 GPS unit is a good choice to interface to a microcontroller, the downside is that it doesn’t use a standard RS-232 port. A converter is available to change the existing port to what we need but since it is costly any serious hacker would build their own converter. “The cheapest GPS reciever I could find was the Holux GM-210 unit. It’s a great unit since

Halloween Light Show - Parallel Port Relay Controller Based

  Check out this cool Parallel Port Relay Controller Based Halloween Light Show it shows what some creative thinking and a bit of code and hardware can produce. “The most important thing you are gonna need is the controller. There are many out there, but for this tutorial (its easiest and cheapest) we are gonna use the kit74 parallel relay board. 30$, 35$ assembled. This circuit is going to interface