Tech Newz

Our friend Daniel Eindhoven from Megavolts has been hard at work improving on the coil gun that we featured here before. The new circuit modifications allows the gun to fire every second now. The new halogen charge resistors look much cooler also.

“At the moment the only limiting factor for fire rate is the charge time, this is the time the capacitor bank takes to get fully charged. This time can be influenced by the charging resistor, a lower value ..read more

The prize this week is a cable tester to help you with troubleshooting. This contest will run for one week (March 6 – 12, 2010) . 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 consisting of:

If you are looking for something to do with your old PS2 keyboards or those junk ones that you sometimes get with new systems why not make a cool Computer Keyboard Rubik’s Cube out of them. Sit this on the coffee table and you will sure have a conversation starter with any geek.   Next step is to make it into a working keyboard, now that would be impressive!

Via: TechEBlog

Go to the original ..read more

Colin Merkel sent in his cool PIC 16F877a Microcontroller based Digital Effects Guitars Pedal. I don’t play myself but I can imagine how fun this pedal would be to jam with. Colin has provided the schematic and code so that you can also build your own if you’re musically inclined.

“I used a number of ICs in the construction of this project, they are listed below.

- PIC16F877a with 20MHz oscillator – 23k256 RAM operating at 20MHz, interfaced via three-wire SPI – ..read more

Here is an interesting Linear Clock that is driven by two Stepper Motors. It is using an Arduino Mega as the brain and an Adafruit motor shield to interface to two stepper motors. The stepper motors turn a lead screw that moves two nuts up an down to indicate the current time.

Via: Adafruit

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The team over at Noisebridge just launched a Near Space Balloon with some gear on board. They got some very nice pictures along the way! It sure seems that this type of project is totally within reach these days. I think my next challenge will be to round up a team of people in Winnipeg who want to attempt this up here. Might have to wait till the snow goes away though.

Via: Make

“The plan was simple: a ham ..read more

This Autopilot for Aerial Photography slide show that was done for Barcamp Antwerp looks really interesting.

“The autopilot has a built in mixer. On first use you need to tell the autopilot what the channel and mixer arrangement of your transmitter/airplane combination is. To put the autopilot in calibration mode, switch on the transmitter, put all sticks in the center and switch channel 6 to “ON”. Now turn on the airplane. At this point you can calibrate the autopilot by putting ..read more

I have never seen a project made with a Diffraction Grating before, but this LEGO Diffraction Grating Projector project has a great looking effect. It’s designed by Carl who was featured here before for his RGV Laser System. Those LEGO universal joints have a very wide working angle (watch the video to see what I am talking about).

Thanks for sending it in Carl.

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There are tons of cool LEGO CNC machines that have been made. The one pictured above can be seen in operation here (unfortunately we can’t embed the video here). It shows how so many people have real creativity since these CNC machines are obviously only for fun since a LEGO frame would not be adequate for doing any real work. Nice thing about LEGO is that once your design is done you can rip it apart can move on to ..read more

How luck are you if you can find a CNC machine like this one for a few hundred dollars! That is exactly what happened to Dave Kush of BuildYourIdea.com.  It wasn’t a fully functional machine so like any huge machine like this that’s sold as is who knows if it will take $10 or $10,000 to get it up and running again. Well thankfully Dave designs stepper drivers so he has more than a step in the right direction in ..read more