The WiiKart, a wireless go kart

May 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Whoops… Looks like we covered this already. My mistake.

In case the name didn’t tip you off, this fun little kart was inspired by MarioKart. The goal was to build a functional go kart that could be controlled via the Nintendo Wiimote. They did a pretty good job and kept it fairly simple too. They designed a frame that vaguely mimics the shape of the carts in the game. The steering is handled by a 4″ stroke linear actuator. This was initially hooked directly to the tie-rod, but they found it to be too slow. Their solution was to put a lever in between the two with a 1to 3 ratio. This made everything much snappier.

Though they were capable of implementing PWM on the motors in their hardware, they opted to stick with full on, full off because of the push-button nature of the controller. The connection and communication are handled with an Arduino and they don’t mention what bluetooth module they use.

You can see in the video below it is fairly responsive and has more than enough power to lug a passenger over some varied terrain.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: transportation hacks Tagged With: , ,

[Matt's] bubble display updated

May 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment

[Matt] emailed in to show us how he has improved his bubble display since the last time we saw it. If you recall from last time, he was having issues with the air pressure dropping when multiple bubbles were released, resulting in smaller bubbles. This time around, he has added an aesthetically pleasing air reservoir to help ensure that his bubbles don’t vary too much. There really wasn’t a reason to use two containers for the reservoir, aside from the fact it is what he had on hand. He has also torn part the part of the display that houses the oil, replacing it with individual tubes for each vertical segment. This makes it easier to regulate the speed of the bubbles, as he found they travel at a constant rate if they are in contact with the edges of the tube.

One downfall of using the vinyl tubes is the fact that it comes in a giant roll. This leaves the tube wanting to curl. To get around this, he stretched it on a wooden dowel and heated it with a heat gun till it relaxed. Using clear PVC or acrylic tubing would be an alternative but would be more expensive.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: hardware, peripherals hacks Tagged With: ,

Generating electricity with swing sets

May 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment

[Guelherme Pena Costa] came up with an idea to light up a swing set using the motion of the people swinging on it to generate electricity. The goal was to get people to enjoy the playground at night and we think, this might actually be a pretty good way to achieve that. People love blink lights, especially if they are interactive.

To Light the LEd ropes, [Guelherme] has attached a gear motor to the frame of the swing set and an arm to the chain. When the swinger swings, it spins the motor generating between 6 and 10 volts at 230-400 mA. As you can see in the video below, that works fine to illuminate the LEDs, though we think a charging circuit to allow the lights to stay lit for longer would also be cool.

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

Project Octopus

May 10, 2012 By Leave a Comment

You know who thinks building a robotic octopus is an awesome idea? EVERYONE. Apparently the idea is a solid enough idea that the European Commision has funded this project. The goal is to mimic the capabilities of the squishiest of the cephalopods in order to advance soft robotics. Or possibly to take over the world.  They are hoping to have a fully capable robot octopus with no rigid structures at all.

You may be thinking that making a squirming tentacle is easy business. What they are attempting however, is the actual movement of an octopus including extension/contraction as well as grasping. This requires a complex system of control wires as well as “artificial muscular hydrostats” to allow it to do all these movements. A flexible skin covered in sensors will be added to the final design.

Filed Under: robots hacks Tagged With: ,

extremely detailed light painting bar

May 10, 2012 By Leave a Comment

[Matt Pandina] has been documenting his build of a very nice light painting bar on his G+ page. His light painting bar has 64 RGB LEDs being driven by an ATmega328P and four TLC5940 chips. He wrote his own libraries to talk to the TLC5940 as well as his own libraries to pull images off of a MicroSD card. He also wrote a cross-platform program that automatically converts a directory  of pngs to something the TLC5940s expect. He says the secret to getting his24-bit color correction looking right is gamma correction. It seems that when the LEDs were run too bright, he couldn’t get the colors quite right.  In case you’re curious, those images are 15 inches tall!

You can follow along through his posts as he starts with just a few LEDs and slowly updates and grows it to the impressive state it is at currently.

Filed Under: hardware, led hacks Tagged With: ,

Cruncher: A robotic toy dinosaur dissection

May 10, 2012 By Leave a Comment

http://youtu.be/brFKOxhgwvI

When my children got these interesting and very obnoxious toy dinosaurs last year, I could barely contain my excitement. I knew that one day, they would be on my work bench giving up their secrets. Cruncher is a fairly recent addition to the robotic animal trend that we’ve been seeing the past few years. Imbued with a personality that is a mixture of T-Rex, beagle, and loudmouth jerk, he’s every kids idea of a perfect pet.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: HackIt, teardown, toy hacks Tagged With: ,
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »