Wooden quadcopter body

[Greasetattoo] shares the process of building his wooden quadcopter body that won 2nd place in the Minnesota state fair.  His plans were purchased as a kit back in 1999, but he never got around to actually building them. The original plans called for a foam board body, but he felt that a wooden piece of art would be much nicer. This build isn’t focusing on the electronics, they’re just a kit from Mikrokopter. Instead, it is a log of the entire process of making the beautiful wooden body. He really put some nice detail in there from the layered and nicely finished dome to the little oak sleeves for his motors. Great job [Greasetattoo].

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Meet The String Doll Gang

The String Doll Gang is just one of the full-of-character offerings of Fair Trade company Kamibashi — the collaboration of Asian artists and a North Carolina couple who were formerly teachers in Japan. They find quirky handmade creations such as The String Doll Gang and partner with the artists to sell their wares online. With more than 100 different personalities to choose from (a word of warning: some are more child-appropriate than others), kids will love these mini 2 to 3-inch toys that make for fun little surprises when traveling, or anytime!

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Reusable Freak-O-Bags

By now you’ve probably amassed a good number of reusable grocery bags, but here’s one more worth adding to your collection — that will get your kids in on the green action too. Kamibashi Freak-O-Bags start as quirky and colorful Asian art-inspired characters and unfold into sturdy, 16-inch square bags. Each one comes with a carabiner clip so you can hang it on the stroller for your little one to play with or ogle on the way to the store. North Carolina designer Julie Armbruster created these novel Fair Trade bags, some of which she makes herself, and some of which are handmade by a family in Thailand.

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Steam powered tank

This steam-powered tank is really something of a steam-electric hybrid. Steam provides the locomotion, but an electrical system provides the remote control and steering. A full boiler will provide 10-15 minutes of operation which you can see in the video after the break. Before you leave a nasty comment: Yes, we realize this project is from several years ago. It’s new to us and the completion date doesn’t diminish the novelty of this well-executed build. This is the quality and uniqueness we’re used to seeing from [Crabfu].

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Amazing chassis hacks

[Crabfu] pulled off some great chassis work on top of a remote control drivetrain. His most recent build turns the tiny traveler into a lunar rover complete with passenger and a communications array. For this he’s sourced the parts from a toy but boosted the realism with hand-painted details that leave us in awe. His previous project sourced the body from a model truck kit. Once again, it’s the paint work that makes us envious of his skills.

Both projects conceal a Losi 1/24 scale micro rock crawler that provides for some incredible locomotion. See video of both builds after the break.

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LEGO robot lays dominoes not eggs

[Mattias] brings the awesome once more with his LEGO robot that sets up dominoes. You’ll remember his work from the wooden keyboard case and the mechanical binary adder. This time around he’s still exercising those woodworking skills by making his own domino tiles, but it’s the robot that makes this interesting. In the must-see video after the break the device lays perfectly straight, perfectly spaced dominoes just begging to be upset by a spoiled toddler. The robot is nothing more than handful of LEGO parts powered by a tape deck motor. The parts may be meager, but there’s an abundance of ingenuity tied up in the design.

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Pong, for real

Over at EvilMadScientistLaboratories.com they’ve asked a question that many of us have never thought to ask. What exactly is Pong supposed to be? Instead of assuming it was ping pong like the rest of us, they decided to build a literal physical interpretation. They may have taken some liberty, using solenoids as the paddles, but the end effect is quite nice. Watching them play actually looks both challenging and fun. There’s a great writeup about the construction, so be sure to check out the project page.

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Missile hack taunts your cat

[Atlantageek] sent in a missile launcher project that he threw together. For Christmas he received a Chumby One and a ThinkGeek USB Rocket Launcher as gifts (lucky dog). Neither of these toys are “played with” in the traditional sense as much as they become centerpieces of your next hack. In that spirit, [Atlantageek] immediately wrote a widget to control the launcher via the Chumby. The side effect of driving his cat bonkers was an unexpected bonus.

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Step-a-sketch

[Chris] is getting his feet wet with Computer Numerical Control starting with an Etch-a-Sketch interface. This is a great way to start out because the really tough parts of the project are already inside of the toy. He’s replaced the two white knobs with stepper motors and connected them through a mosfet network to a PIC 16f84a. The PIC then gets its commands from a computer via the parallel port.

A video of the CNC machine can be seen after the break. He needs to add a frame to increase the precision of the images drawn but this first attempt is pretty good. We prefer to have the computer in charge of the design because controlling an Etch-a-Sketch with a mouse doesn’t make our drawings any better. Read the rest of this entry »

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Star Trek submarine

You can try to be unimpressed. You can attempt to feign disinterest. But even the most casual Star Trek fan will get giddy watching this model submarine in action. Apparently there is a group that builds under water R/C vehicles from static models. It’s not Star Trek exclusively either, we saw some anime vehicles as well as a modern-day shuttle replica.

[via Makezine]

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Open source artillery

Thanks to [Josh, Kyle, and Mike], it is now possible to wage (Nerf) war with an Arduino. The turret designed around it is capable of shooting 6 foam projectiles in close succession, between reloads. The faux weapon interfaces with a computer through the Arduino’s onboard serial link (via USB). Software on the PC sends commands to the Arduino, which then executes functions, such as panning, tilting, firing, and rotating the cylinder. The power for the firing itself comes from a 5 gal, 80 psi air compressor. The Java software on the host PC also does smarter things, like show streaming video from the turret’s webcam and even performs basic object tracking (with mixed success). All the code for building the brute is available on [Josh's] website.

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brickAVR: the Proto-brick

Sometimes, prototyping systems need to be robust, full-featured, and powerful. Other times, nostalgia and simplicity are much more appealing. Rather than buying a pre-made prototyping board, one of our readers grabbed some parts lying around, including an Atmega8, a SMD 16Mhz oscillator, and a 6 pin ISP header, and performed some circuit origami free-form soldering (thanks [Gilberti]!). After it was assembled, he realized that it fit in a hollowed out 2×6 Lego brick rather easily. After adding female headers to the pins, as well as a label and some hot glue to seal it up, he was left with a fully functional, and most likely very durable centerpiece to a project. We would love to see this worked into a Lego Mindstorm robot, just for the sake of fitting in.

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Digital BMXing through San Francisco

[Alpay] sent in this project he did recently. He was hired to produce a kiosk that would stand out to the kids at the event. He chose to make a bike riding game utilizing open source hardware and software. There was some thought put into what interface to use to make it easiest for people to just pick up and use. The ultimate decision was a simple one. Use real handle bars from a bike. As for software, they used Blender, the open source 3d creation program. The actual control is done via a pair of Arduinos, an accelerometer, and a pair of XBee modules.

He notes that blender is fully capable of accepting the serial input from the controller, but they opted to have the controller mimic keystrokes to make life easier on the developer, as well as make the controller usable on more games. Maybe if enough people ask really nice, he’ll release the source code for the controller.

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Hack a Sketch

Sometimes we miss that old Etch a Sketch we had when we were kids. The challenge of producing a decent image using those two knobs was always fun and frustrating at the same time. This project lets us recreate this interface on our computer. The Hack a Sketch is a combination of an Etch a Sketch style input and a processing sketch to recreate the experience. They’re using an Arduino to interpret the inputs and feed it to the computer via USB. We really like this thing. Simplify the electronics and we could see this as a neat toy for sale somewhere like Thinkgeek.

[via hacked gadgets]

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Complete the maze, get a gumball

This neat accelerometer controlled marble maze adds a level of fun to retrieving a gum ball. You have to first navigate the maze using a controller that has a dual axis accelerometer in it to control the angle of the platform. Though that does look like a wii accessory, there is no wiimote in there. Only after you have completed it will the gum ball machine dispense the candy. [Dan] constructed everything himself, which might explain the lack of “pits” for the marble to fall into in the maze.

More details on the build and source code are available on his page.

[via hacked gadgets]

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R/C airplane motors from computer trash

Here’s something that the R/C airplane crowd might think of as old news. These directions show us how to rework floppy drive and CD Rom motors to be high power airplane motors. There are several listed, with details on each, but those unfamiliar might want to start with the most basic CD Rom version. It covers winding your own copper and installing the magnets in the “bell”, putting it all together and mounting it. This is a great writeup for those who haven’t seen this done before. If you want something even simpler though, you might enjoy the homopolar motor post. If you’re more advanced, they have tips for you too on machining and balancing the motors as well as winding density.

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Set phasers to “blind”

[Directive0] added a 200mW laser to his Enterprise Phase Pistol toy. This joins the ranks of hand-held laser hacks that we’ve seen around here lately. His build makes use of the stun and kill settings of the toy to switch between different modes. The built-in 9 volt battery holder is tapped into for power. When set to stun, the stun LED indicator is illuminated and a trigger pull sends current limited electricity to the laser diode. When the kill (or blind) setting is selected, the appropriate LED is illuminated and the trigger sends the full current from the battery to the laser diode. Power regulation is managed by the driver circuit for the laser.

This build preserves the unmodded look of the toy gun. [Directive0's] inclusion of protective glass should fend off the warnings we usually see in the comments of these types of hacks.

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MindFlex teardown

Maybe we’re just imagining things, but it seems to us like brainwave control is the latest trend in toys. Similar to Uncle Milton’s Force Trainer, Mattel has recently released the MindFlex, a game that involves moving a plastic ball up and down through an obstacle course that you control using your brainwaves. Naturally when [Alpha] saw this, he decided to take it apart and document what he found. After disassembling both the headset and the base, he found that most of the chips were covered in black resin making them unidentifiable. However, he was able to find identify one chip, the NeuroSky TGAT1-L64 D498Q-010 0924. Judging by the name alone, we would guess that this is the chip that makes the brainwave control possible. While there’s no mention as to whether you’ll be able to interface with this like you can with the Force Trainer, we’re sure that it’s only a matter of time before someone figures out how to use this to control more than just a floating plastic ball.

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Football Hero

For Kasabian’s new single Underdog, they decided to do something original. After dreaming up a Guitar Hero style controller powered by soccer football players, they set out to make it happen. Using 5 wall mounted pressure sensors connected to a microcontroller, they hooked up the rig to a computer running Frets on Fire (an open source Guitar Hero clone) with a custom version of their single. After an afternoon of practice, the team was able to 5 star the song, and while this isnt the only or most complex Guitar Hero hack, we would love to have this in our house.

Video after the break.

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Mind control via serial port

[Zibri] found a very simple method for using brain waves as a controller via a DB9 serial port. He’s using Uncle Milton’s Force Trainer which we saw yesterday in the brain controlled Arduino. In that project the Arduino tapped into the LEDs and interfaced those signals with a computer via USB. This time the connection was made using an RS-232 transceiver to pass data from the programming header inside of the toy’s base unit to a computer over the serial port. Tapping into the programming header has a lot more potential and should be more reliable than sniffing logic out of LED connections. [Zibri] has written an application to display the received data but it doesn’t look like he’s made the code available for download.

Apparently he tipped us off about a week ago. We recall seeing this submission but as you can tell it’s a little bit light on the detail. So if you want your tips to be at the front of the line, make sure you do what you can to fill us in on all the details of your project. At our request [Zibri] provided a picture of the PCB from the Force Trainer’s base unit. See it after the break. Read the rest of this entry »

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