Hackaday Links: February 1, 2012

The only thing he needs now is a micro and RTC

For [Dino]’s 44th Hack A Week extravaganza, he made powered window blinds in five minutes. It’s a simple build with a small gear motor and a bit of tubing to adapt the shaft to the control rod of the blinds. Good job [Dino].

BecauseCamelCaseWillKillYourPinkieFinger

The wonderful [Lizzie] over at LUSTlab realized that typing meta keys really slows down the development process. The result? Foot pedals for the Shift and Command keys. No build log for this one, but it’s just a set of old racing pedals and a disused keyboard.

So much cooler than a potato

[mdevaev] out of Russia built a fully articulated GLaDOS replica. Here’s the build album and the relevant MLP forum post. This GLaDOS is tiny – probably less than a foot long, but it moves around and speaks (Russian, which is weird). Somebody get us a couple of motorcycle fenders so we can build the 1:1 scale version.

Visualizing a plane of fog

[greg] was looking for a way to visualize the chaotic turbulence of air. He mounted a laser on a computer fan and held some dry ice above the beam. The result looks like it could make for an interesting photography project, but check out the video if you don’t believe us.

We were asking for it

We asked for battery charging circuits that don’t use specialized parts. [Petr] found this one that only uses few transistors, a MOSFET and a voltage regulator. In one of the Hackaday comments, [atomsoft] had the idea of putting a USB plug on the traces to save a bit in component costs. [mohonri] said he designed one, but we have yet to see it. Perhaps next links post…

Comments

  1. noouch says:

    The smoke/fog thing has already been taken to the next level, scanning a laser through smoke and storing the data in a voxel grid:

    http://gl.ict.usc.edu/Research/Smoke/

  2. mohonri says:

    As requested, here is proof of my outlandish claims for the LiPo charger:
    http://blog.allgaiershops.com/2012/02/01/shoot-the-engineer-and-start-production/

    • Spork says:

      Haha, thanks for posting your work. I’m sure you saved plenty of us from the re-invention of the wheel.
      The board layout looks great, unfortunately we’ll probably see them shipping out of China in a week.

  3. Hirudinea says:

    As for the foot pedal, they missed the obvious, Crtl-Alt-Del.

  4. Colecago says:

    I made some foot pedals recently, out of industrial control pedals, they are big, metal, and going to last

    http://blog.colecago.com/?p=19

    I use them in counterstrike for walk and voice buttons.

  5. Peter says:

    Where is the link for the foot pedal? LustLabs does not have it on their frontpage where the link directs…

  6. Whatnot says:

    PWM that laserdiode and you have a highspeed flash strobe that might give more interesting results.

  7. Halexander says:

    Am I the only one who wants that GlaDOS model to be able to import movement files from the actual game itself, so it can move and talk just like it should?

  8. kasperko says:

    For a students, special foot pedals
    Turbo Acadmic 300-

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