Hack A Day had a cool contest where the goal was to build a Walking Santa. You can see the entries and winners here. There were lots of cool hacks but I like this one by Adam Outler the best. An Arduino controls the new Santa robot and some transistors are used to power the existing Santa motors. The new and improved Santa looks a bit mad but he has
Dig out the old 386 and 486 desktop computers out of the garage we now have a use for them! Youtube user Fun to the Head has stuffed two 3.5 inch floppy drives and two 5.25 inch floppy drives into a vintage computer case, with the magic of a modern PIC microcontroller the system is able to come to life and play the drives as if they were instruments. Via:
Jérôme Demers from the Université de Sherbrooke built this fun Fart Meter, I can just imagine how much fun this would be in an office environment. 🙂 The meter uses an Arduino to monitor a Methane sensor, the dial then indicates how much gas it detected. Not sure I would want to be a judge in this competition… You probably remember Jerome from his Robot Build that he shared with
In many 3D TV system you need to wear special active glasses, these glasses are synced to the video signal so that the TV can display the image for the right eye while covering the left and vice versa.  Jonathan Post has created a 3D TV system that uses the same principle but instead of LCD lenses shielding alternate eyes he simply applies a small electrical charge to
Alibaba is a great site for finding suppliers of almost anything you could need when you start making your products in a bit of volume. I have used them for a number of years now and it works quite well to sort out the companies you would like to deal with. They also have a service called AliExpress which is for single item purchases or small volume purchases. Pricing on
The Department of Homeland Security has something they call the Threat Advisories, these come in 5 levels. Turns out some people would like to have one of these hanging on their wall so that they can crank up the threat level when they want to. Michal Zalewski thought it would be a good idea to make a display of his own, the display uses the same concept as the Word
I wonder when the sky will be as accessible as the roads. I would love to think that within my lifetime this would become reality but that might be a lofty thought. If anyone could build a SkyFly Vertical Takeoff Aircraft on a shoestring budget it would be Mark Rumsey who has worked on the International Space Station program and the F/A-18 Super Hornet. Even for him I think that
