Why this hasn’t been done before is a mystery to me. This little hack project by Kellbot of NYCResistor takes a rolling ball, an optical mouse, a gutted PS2 controller, and some Arduino hacking and makes it into a working (and awesome) virtual Katamari. Why didn’t they have special controllers like this that came with the game? It makes so much sense!
Video or it didn’t happen. Oh, video is inside! What now, boyee? → Read More
Those little scamps over at Adafruit are always up to something. This time they built a “pager scanner” which is basically a system that grabs all of the pages transmitted on pager networks and displays them. Sadly, the pager network isn’t as juicy as it used to be and now only drops sports scores and emergency broadcasts. → Read More
This kaleidoscopic fever dream of a coffee table is equipped with a 9×9 matrix of LEDs, which can apparently be set to “acid flashback” mode if necessary. It’s kind of like a demonically-possessed Lite Brite. When it’s not blasting color at your living room, though, I can think of a couple interesting uses for it. → Read More
Since neckwarmers just can’t be neckwarmers, this guy put together a LilyPad Arduino neckwarmer. A simple neckwarmer was modified with lights, a LilyPad Arduino, and a light sensor to make the lights blink when it’s dark. → Read More
So you need your project to pause for a preset number of minutes but you can’t do it programatically? Why not connect a micro-controller to an hourglass egg timer to sense when the sand stops moving through the glass. A motor then resets the hourglass once the sand runs out, thereby repeating the process, ad infinitum. Pretty groovy, huh? → Read More
It’s really more half-a-Triscuit-sized. This little 1.2″x0.7″ $20 board is a good solution for your home projects that require a little computation but not a lot of space. Say you want to put a little RFID detector in your door that unlocks it when you come near. Don’t need a big hard drive-sized package nailed to the door; with a Teensy you could practically embed the system in the doorknob. → Read More
Make’s Phil Torrone entered this odd gadget, the Tweet-a-Watt, in the Green Gadgets design competition. It’s essentially a Kill-a-Watt with a capacitor and transmitter added that will Tweet your current power usage using a nearby computer or wireless Arduino mini PC. → Read More
These little Arduino boards are a real boon to amateur electronics tinkerers: cheap, versatile, and very small. This guy had the idea to make a high-speed photography setup using one, instead of the more direct circuits usually involved. His reasoning was that the Arduino allows for a lot of easy customization, like for instance hooking up a sound sensor as well as a laser sensor. It allows for failsafes, better timing, and involvement of mixed hardware and software which may in turn control the object drop, speed of projectile, and so on. I’d definitely be rocking one of these if I had the time to throw down on some sweet high-speed shooting. His gallery is here, but there are more photos over at Hack n Mod. → Read More
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1853931&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1Arduinoboy mGB from trash80 on Vimeo. This haxor installed an Arduino Mini into a Game Boy case and then used a MIDI keyboard to play through the internal speaker. It basically turns the Game Boy into a synthesizer. The code is open so you can mod it all yourself. The Arduino is an open hardware platform that we’ve covered here quite a bit. → Read More
This odd fellow is an Arduino-based system for reading – and reacting to – incoming Twitter messages. While his eyes look like they’re made of CORN it’s nice to see someone as sad as me about getting incoming Tweets. via Giz → Read More
Arduino is little open source circuit board that lets you create some fairly compelling projects with a few lines of code and some circuit boards. The latest addition to the project is LiquidWare’s TouchShield, an sensitive OLED that sits on top of the main board. Here it interacts with its human subject. (via Make) → Read More
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