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September 12, 2013 By Leave a Comment

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DIY Science – Acid/Base Natural Indicators

May 16, 2012 By 4 Comments

Nearly everything at [HAD] is at least based on science in some way or another. If, however, you would like to do some actual scientific experiments with stuff around the house, [Observationsblog] might be for you.

The particular posts that [Ken] wrote in to tell us about were all about acids, bases, and natural indicators. In his first post he goes over some definitions of acids, bases, and what pH exactly means. A good refresher for those that have forgotten some of their high school (or college) chemistry classes.

The other two posts have to do with making your own natural acid/base indicators. The first is called Anthocyanin, and can be extracted from Red Cabbage.  Quite specific directions can be found here. Similar directions can be found to turn the Indian spice of [Turmeric] into an indicator as well. Although these concepts probably won’t help build your next robot, they could easily be copied inspire young minds for a great science fair project!

Filed Under: chemistry hacks, featured Tagged With: , ,

I build stuff too! Fire Cannon Edition

May 15, 2012 By Leave a Comment

After hanging around festivals and burners for a bit I decided that it was finally time to show my stuff and actually build one of these crazy fire cannons everyone is always talking about.  The easiest way to go about this would have been to just follow plans from any given website: replace the valve from an empty grill tank with a 4 way fitting, add an electric solenoid, barrel, low pressure regulator (for the pilot), and then pipe in a regulated propane source. Easy.  The problem My problem with this stock fire cannon design is that it looks like every other fire cannon out there, you have your off the shelf propane bottle and a long thin copper barrel poking up from it, the fire is nice but the cannon is not very fun to look at. Also you can only fit a given size valve, and that does not allow for very much fuel to be released at once. This limits the size of the plume of fire, and where is the fun in that.  The central idea is to add lots of little bottles instead of one big one; I stumbled on a nice pretty anodized aluminum water manifold and the idea grew out from there.

Now, keep in mind I did not just set out to build this crazy thing out of nowhere and slap everything together without laying out some plans. I have been working with the folks over at Frank’s Kitchens for some time, and have been able to pick up a lot of safety practices and general safe handling procedure to keep myself from burning down the entire county. If you want to set out to make a flame effect that is great, but just read up on safety first and try to check out a fire cannon in person… That’s what I did and I still have most of my eyebrows as a result (no arm hair though).

Enough freaking text. Check out the video below for a tour!

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Filed Under: featured, misc hacks Tagged With: ,

You’ll throw your back out playing this analog TV synth

May 15, 2012 By Leave a Comment

de-rastra

While CRT televisions fall to the wayside as more people adopt flat-panel TVs, the abundance of unused sets gives hacker/artist [Kyle Evans] an unlimited number of analog canvases on which to project his vision. He recently wrote in to share his latest creation which he dubs “de/Rastra”.

The “CRT Performance Interface” as he calls it, is an old analog television which he hacked to display signals created by moving the TV around. Fitted with an array of force sensors, accelerometers, and switches, the display is dynamically generated by the movements of whomever happens to be holding the set.

Signals are sent wirelessly from his sensor array to an Atmel 328 microcontroller with the help of a pair of XBee radios, where they are analyzed and used to generate a series of audio streams. The signals are fed into a 400W amplifier before being inserted into the CRT’s yoke, and subsequently displayed on the screen.

We’re sure [Kyle] is probably trying to express a complex metaphor about man’s futile attempts to impose his control over technology with his project, but we think it simply looks cool.

Check out [Kyle’s] work for yourself in the video below and give us your take in the comments.

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Filed Under: classic hacks, home entertainment hacks Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Mapping the surface of a video game moon

May 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Writing for Hackaday isn’t all fun and games; occasionally I need to actually write posts and reply to emails from builders around the globe. Usually, though, I’m knee-deep in a personal project, or just hanging out playing a few video games. Recently I’ve gone off the deep end with Kerbal Space Program, an awesome little space flight simulator set in an alternate reality where everyone is just slightly incompetent.

As it turns out, there’s actually a lot of fairly technical objectives in this game, from performing orbital rendezvous to mapping the surface of another planet. It didn’t take long for me to go off the deep end and start mapping the Kerbal moon and turning it into a 3D object. Check out how I did this after the break.

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Filed Under: cnc hacks, featured, toy hacks Tagged With: , ,

Your mug on an Etch a Sketch — automatically

May 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment

[Jim’s] pretty serious about his Etch a Sketch. He’s gone to the trouble of building a rig that will automatically render a photograph as Etch a Sketch art. Do you recognize the US political figure being plotted in this image? He actually cracks these open and removes all of the internals to preserve the artwork when the reassembled body is ready to be hung on a wall. But we like it for the hacker-friendly interface techniques he used.

He moves the knobs using a pair of stepper motors. They attach thanks to a pair of 3D printed gears he modeled which go over the stock knobs and secure with four set screws. He says he can be up and printing in five minutes using these along with the MDF jig that holds the body and the motors.

He converts photos to 1-bit images, then runs them through ImageMagick to convert them into a text file. A Python script parses that text, sending appropriate commands to an Arduino which drives the motors. The image is drawn much like a scanning CRT monitor. The stylus tracks one horizontal line at a time, drawing a squiggle if the pixel should be black, or skipping it if it should be white.

We wish there was a video of the printing process. Since we didn’t find one, there’s a bonus project unrelated to this one after the break. It’s an Etch a Sketch clock.

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Filed Under: featured, toy hacks Tagged With: , , , , ,
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