These days, when doing any sort of optical tracking, our mind immediately leaps towards sophisticated solutions. Raspberry Pis, high end cameras, and machine learning toolchains all come to mind. Of course, if your goals are simpler, you needn’t complicate the issue. PHIL is a light tracking robot who is perfectly happy to do it the old-school
LIGHT TRACKING ROBOT RELIES ON LDRS Continue Reading
Teaching kids about robotics gives them valuable skills for their futures, and is generally pretty darn fun for all involved, too. However, teaching children often involves taking a bit of a different tack to educating college students, and more of a hand-holding approach is often needed. This robot project is an attempt to do just
EDUCATIONAL ROBOT TEACHES WITH MAGNETS AND SERVOS Continue Reading
At one time or another, most of us have seen a gadget for sale and thought we could build something similar for cheaper. Of course, we’re almost always wrong. Not about being able to build it, mind you. But when you add up the cost of the materials, the tool or two you almost inevitably
HEAVY METAL POWER BANK USES TOOL BATTERIES Continue Reading
A few years ago, YouTubing madman [Colin Furze] took an old bumper car and made a 600-horsepower beast of a go-kart that managed to clock 100MPH with a headwind. This isn’t that. It’s a miniaturized, remote-control homage to [Colin]’s go-kart that is equally awesome. [Forsyth Creations] started by CAD-modeling the chassis right on top of a
WORLD’S SMALLEST VERSION OF WORLD’S FASTEST BUMPER CAR Continue Reading
Every so often, console manufacturers release a crystal edition of their hardware that never really lives up to the hype. The manufacturing realities of producing optically clear plastic mean the expense is rarely justified, even for a special edition. Instead, we get hazy, smoky translucent cases that are comparatively underwhelming. Here to rectify that, [BitHead1000] delivers
CLEAR PS2 IS THE CRYSTAL EDITION WE DESERVED Continue Reading
[Christofer Hiitti] found himself with the latest Microsoft Flight Simulator on his PC, but the joystick he ordered was still a few weeks out. So he grabbed an Arduino, potentiometers and a button and hacked together what a joke-yoke. The genius part of this hack is the way [Christopher] used his desk drawer for pitch control.
TURNING A DESK DRAWER INTO A FLIGHT YOKE Continue Reading
Full-size metal detectors are great for narrowing down a region to start digging through. But what if you had a smaller metal detector that could pinpoint the location? Then you could spend far less time digging and way more time sweeping for metal. Metal detectors work because of the way metal behaves around electromagnetic fields. [mircemk] reused
PRECISION METAL DETECTOR FINDS NEEDLES IN HAYSTACKS Continue Reading
One of the worst things about sewing is finding out that your bobbin — that’s the smaller spool that works together with the needle and the larger spool to make a complete stitch — ran out of thread several stitches ago. If you’re lucky, the machine has a viewing window on the bobbin so you
ARDUINO BOBBIN WINDING MACHINE IS FREAKY FAST Continue Reading
Our old math teacher famously said, “You have to take what you know and use it find what you don’t know.” The same holds true for a lot of microcontroller designs including [rgco’s] clever metal detector that uses very little other than an Arduino. The principle of operation is simple. An Arduino can measure time, a coil
ARDUINO AND WIRE DETECTS METAL Continue Reading
If there’s any holiday that is worth adjusting for strange times, it’s gotta be Halloween. Are you inclined to leave a bowl of candy on the porch to avoid the doorbell? If so, this is the perfect year to finally figure out some sort of metering apparatus so that greedy preteens are less likely to
STOMP BUTTON, RECEIVE CANDY Continue Reading
