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Tuesday, November 1
CadSoft Updates EAGLE with Bug Fixes and New Features
The post CadSoft Updates EAGLE with Bug Fixes and New Features appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
FingerRing is Simplest Multichannel Mixer
It’s hard to make an audio mixer with any less technology than FingerRing (YouTube video, embedded below). We’re pretty sure that [Sergey Kasich] isn’t going to get a patent on this one. But what he does get is our admiration for pushing a simple idea far enough that it’s obviously useful.
The basic idea is transmitting signals using the human body as a conductor. What [Sergey] does is lay out multiple sound sources and sinks on the table, and then play them like a mixer made musical instrument. Pressing harder reduces the resistance, and makes the sound louder. Connecting to two sources mixes them (in you). Watch the video — he gets a lot of mileage out of this one trick.
We can think of a number of improvements to this system. A bunch of nails in a board acting as the contact points would be a lot easier to play than 1/4″ cables taped down to a desk. You could make it a permanent instrument. If you were designing the system from scratch, you’d want high-input-impedance amplifiers on the receiving end. Add a notch filter to kill the mains hum, or an instrumentation amp and another electrode on your ankle. Pretty soon, you’re an EKG and a mixing desk.
The biggest limitation he has is that the body is just one big conductor. Can anyone think of how to get multiple channels through flesh and bone without making the whole setup over-complicated? Now excuse us as we tape instrument cables all over our desk. We’re inspired.
Filed under: digital audio hacks
Web Matrix Control Proves Power of ESP8266
LED matrix projects are all over the place, but this one is interesting for its simplicity: it’s an LED matrix that is driven straight from an ESP8266 board. [Ray] put it together as a quick project for his students to teach the basics of LED programming.
It’s built using a WS2812 LED matrix board he designed himself and his own ESPToy ESP8266 dev board. But the gist of the hardware is simply an ESP8266 and some WS2812’s. Where this gets interesting is with the user interaction side of things. The ESP makes WiFi and web serving easy, and [Ray] has build a simple HTTP GET API into the firmware. This is a great combination for the web dashboard and JavaScript-based animation programs [Ray] is demonstrating in the video below.
Just get on the same network and load up the module’s WiFi address for a graphical representation of the 5×7 LED matrix. Pick a color, turn pixels on or off, or choose a predefined pattern and send it to the hardware. This is a powerful way to get use input and with this as a guide it’s fast to set up for pretty much an application you can think of. Just work your way through the documents he put together for the workshop (Zip file link), including all of the code and the slides he used to run the workshop.
Filed under: wireless hacks
Vietnam War Helicopter Turned Amphibious Racecar
Our hats off to [SpeedyCop] and his [Gang of Outlaws] for turning a junked former Vietnam War helicopter into both an amphibious vehicle and a road race car. Yes, that’s right. It’s both driven on water and raced in the 24 Hours of LeMons at New Jersey Motorsports Park.
It started life as a 1969 Bell OH-58 Kiowa (US Army Vietnam Assault helo) and had not only served in Vietnam but also for a federal drug task force. It was chopped up for parts and the body found its way to [SpeedyCop] and friends. The body now sits on an 80s Toyota van chassis, has a Mazda Miata rear suspension, and Audi 3.0 V6 engine.
The pontoons were originally added to hide the seam between the helicopter body and the van but they then inspired the idea of making it amphibious. And with the addition of a four-blade, 7000 RPM propeller from a parasail boat, the idea became reality, as you can see in the video after the break (we suspect the trailing line is a rope to pull it back to shore in case of engine failure).
If you’re looking for more combinations in a single vehicle, how about this military multi-bladed VTOL and off-road vehicle that even if seen, wouldn’t be believed. And still on the theme of personal helicopters, there’s this one by a hacker in Africa who made his own helicopter.
[via Popular Science]
Filed under: transportation hacks
Handheld Sudoku (Assuming You Have Large Hands)
[Hari Waguna] wanted to build a computerized Sudoku game. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t be a big deal. You can buy one, of course, but what fun is that? There’s plenty of apps for phones, but again, not much of a challenge. If you want to preserve your hacker cred, you’d use a CPU board like an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi with an LCD screen, right? But if you want to grow your hacker cred, you’d follow [Hari’s] lead and use 81 seven-segment displays and a membrane keyboard.
Driving that many displays takes some doing (in this case shift registers). [Hari] uses some other tricks, like reading the keyboard using a single pin (and a resistor network). He’s made several videos about the project, including the one below.
The PCB measures eight inches by a little over five inches. Maybe that’s handheld. Practical? Probably not. Cool? Undeniably.
We’ve seen something similar before, although perhaps not as compact. If you really want street cred, you can always try nixie tubes.
Filed under: Arduino Hacks
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