You might be a geeky dad if: your kids practice spelling in Morse code

May 8, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Kids learn better if they’re engaged in the topic at hand. [Todd] found something that has his son just begging to practice his spelling words each night. He converts them all to Morse code and taps each out on the Morse code practice station they built together. To start off Todd connected the keyer to his Fluke 87 meter, using the continuity tester to sound a beep each time the key is depressed. But this is just a temporary setup until [Todd] could help guide his young one through some circuit design and assembly.

The replacement is based on a 555 timer. They grabbed an electronics project book and found the schematic along with a Morse code primer. With parts in hand [Todd] films as his son hones his soldering skills with each connection. The finished project uses the timer chip to produce the audio frequency heard from the on-board speaker. If you’ve never had the joy of teaching a kid how to solder, you’re going to love seeing the video.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: misc hacks Tagged With: ,

Replicating the fancy touch sensor that uses anything

May 8, 2012 By Leave a Comment

[Sprite_tm], a name many of you will recognize from these pages, has wasted no time in replicating the latest cool thing in a much simpler fashion. En Garde is a touch sensor that can detect up to 32 different points of contact on… whatever you use as the surface.  He couldn’t sit idly by and let the Disney funded one from yesterday keep the spot light. As you can see in the video, it works pretty well. If he didn’t tell you that his can only detect up to 32 points as opposed to the 200 of the other, you probably wouldn’t even notice the difference.  Of course, [Sprite_tm] also shares how you could easily beef his up to be even more precise. You can also download his source code an schematics from his site and give it a try yourself.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: classic hacks, multitouch hacks Tagged With: , ,

A bit about the diode

May 8, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Most of you already know what a diode is, but how much do you really know about the device?

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Ask Hackaday Tagged With: ,

A Clockwork Useless Machine Prototype

May 8, 2012 By Leave a Comment

usless-machine-mechanical-clockwork

Most of us have seen the [Useless Machine] where a switch is flipped and a finger comes out to turn it off, retreating into it’s box again. Most of those are electrical, but why not a [Useless Machine] made only of mechanical clockwork? Apparently this has been done before, but why not one more?

After some rough, sketches, and almost no research, I finally “came up with” a way to do this mechanically. A small wheel acts as the driver for the assembly, which is weighed down by a T-handle attached to a string wrapped around it. When released, this smaller wheel fully rotates causing the larger wheel to rotate up around ninety degrees then come down again. In reality, the flipped switch doesn’t reverse the motion of the finger at all, it instead stops it from cycling over and over. The video after the break may explain it a bit better.

This machine currently is a prototype. Although it works well without a lid on at simply reversing the switch, it’s much too fast and isn’t capable of lifting any sort of weight. Like a lid to come out of, for instance. This whole assembly was made possible with my CNC router and inexpensive/easily machineable MDF. [Read more…]

Filed Under: misc hacks Tagged With: , ,

Pinball Stomp: Part 2

May 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment

This is the 2nd and final part of this project. If you haven’t seen part 1 yet, jump back and check it out.

Now that we have the controller box made and ready to go, we just have to build some simple stomp sensors. As I said before, I doubt this will hold anyones attention longer than a night or two. With that in mind, I wanted to make this as cheaply and simply as possible.

To make these, you need the following:

  • Foam board or thick cardboard
  • aluminum tape
  • wire
  • duct tape

That’s it… no really, that’s it. Check out the video after the break to see how it all went, and what the kids thought of it.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: classic hacks, pcs hacks, peripherals hacks Tagged With:

Firefly cap has no battery and is meant for indoor light harvesting

May 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment

[Michael Ossman] wrote in to show off his newest project. He calls it the Firefly cap, which we think is something of a play on words. You can see that it serves as the cap of a Mason jar, but it also uses a supercap instead of a rechargeable battery.

Posts about firelfly jars go way back. And [Michael] mentions that a similar firefly project was his first embedded project. The concept uses LEDs suspended in a jar. When a light detector senses the target level of darkness, the lights inside begin to twinkle like their insect namesakes.

We like this design for two reasons. It’s aimed at collecting light in an indoor environment so you don’t have to worry about placing it in the sun. And it uses a super capacitor instead of a battery so this should truly keep going and going without wearing out the energy storage components. We also like the fact that although this is a Kickstarter project, everything you need to build your own is already available at the Github repository.

Filed Under: Microcontrollers Tagged With: , , , ,
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »