A clever way to use a bicycle computer as a poor-man’s tachometer. While I’m not sure about installing it in my car, I’m sure it’ll come in handy down the road for another project. "Sometimes you just have to know how fast a wheel or shaft or motor is turning. The measuring device for rotational speed is a tachometer. But they are expensive and not easy to find. Its
Futz’s Microcontrollers & Robotics has a few balancing robots featured, the second version was built on the non functioning first attempt. It is still a work in progress but the build log is good and it will be interesting to see the progress of this project all the way to completion. Still seems that accelerometers are quite pricey, has anyone found a good deal on these anywhere? See a
Are you a WOW fan and want to get more immersed into the game? Stop running around using a joystick hop on a RunCraft and Race Across Azeroth! "We bought extremely cheap manual treadmills off of Amazon and decided to sense their speed with a mouse rather than trying to hook into the treadmill’s output with some sort of analog interface. I wrote a quick script in GlovePIE to
Wichit Sirichote has built a solar recorder that stores data to a compact flash memory card, there are full details including code and schematics available so that you can make your own. Even if you don’t need a solar recorder you can see how to store data to compact flash from a PIC microcontroller. "The EMF from pyranometer is 14uV/Wm-2. For 1000W/m-2, the output EMF will be .0014V. The
 We have seen lots of automated sentry guns over the past year but this Autonomous Paintball Sentry Gun by Zero Op is the first I have seen for sale. For about $3000 you could buy the system and have enough left over to buy some paintballs. If you need to guard a large open area this may be just the ticket. Find more paintball gear and supplies at Empire
Looking for a personal submarine? Have a look at the Triton 1000. Honestly what drew me to it wasn’t the actual sub but rather the design, I think this would make a great scaled down model. "The Triton 1000 is U.S. Submarines’ latest design and represents an advanced, light weight minimum volume 2-person configuration engineered specifically for deployment from megayachts. With an overall height of 1.8 meters and an
This contest will run for one week (Aug 23 – Aug 28, 2008) . Ending time is based on central standard time. To enter, identify the item pictured above and give an example of what can be done with it. Please do not give the answer in the comments. Send an email to contest @ hackedgadgets.com with "Name the Thing Contest" as the subject, and the message body
