Check out these cool LED fireflies you can make!

The inspiration for this project comes from having never lived in an area where fireflies were common and being deeply fascinated whenever I encounter them in my travels. The flash patterns have been digitized from firefly behavioral research data found online and were modeled in Mathematica so that variations of speed and intensity could be generated. The final output was transformed by a lightness function and written into header files as 8-bit PWM data.

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Here’s a cool roomba for robot enthusiasts that iRobot just released. Great news for todbot!
Now he can spend more time making some more cool stuff with this one although he’s hacked
Roomba enough that we probably don’t need this new IROBOT Create…dur…
Thanks chiwawa for the info! :0)

Today at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, iRobot publicly released its latest product, the iRobot Create, “a programmable robot for entertainment and education. The base of the Create is similar to the Scooba, the company’s floor-mopping robot, and the carpet-vacuuming Roomba. It comes with wheels, motors for movement, and sensors that prevent it from tumbling downstairs or getting mired in corners.

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Remember the Tux Droid couple articles back? We found a video!
Yipee!

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UPDATE:

2 more videos from Andy, thanks Andy!

Cool voice dude….

Here’s a cool DIY on how to dismantle your broken or old laser printer. Although you might not
be able to fix your laser printer, this is a very good DIY as a reference while hacking your
old laser printer.

I recently got a used laser printer (Canon LBP-4) from cit since he moved to Regensburg and sorted out some surplus hardware.

Having ordered a new toner for 23 Euros I had to notice that the printer is broken

The Display said 52 SERVICE and google told me that it’s probably the motor of the laser scanner.

So I grabbed the screwdriver and had a look into the printer.

outdated, but solid hardware

Some time ago they built hardware bigger, rugged, modular and with no SMD parts. Thus fixing stuff was easier.

The printer is such a piece of hardware consisting of modular non-SMD electronics. There are separate and removable circuit boards for parallel port interface, postscript processor and the printer control.

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Check out this cool laser projector using AVR. WOw.

Motor spins drum with 16 mirrors around at about 20-30 rev/second. The mirrors are tilted differently, so that they draw one line each on the screen. Rotation time is measured by the reading fork and divided by 16*32=512. This is the pixel clock. When the reading fork senses that the wire attached to the mirror drum passes, a new frame starts, and the pixel clock starts. For each pixel, the laser is turned on or off. Simple as that! Each line contains 32 pixels, but only 16 are used. The remaining 16 pixels on a line do either represent the gap between mirrors, or, they are used for calibration. Oh, yes. The calibration. I won’t be attempting that again any day soon. Each mirror is calibrated in the Y-direction by tediously moving them physically. T-e-d-i-o-u-s-l-y. Did I mention that? The X-direction calibration is done with a lookup-table in software. Ahhh… software… And there’s your picture. Making video is the easy part. That’s just a matter of changing the picture every 4 or 5 frames or so.

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Check out this cool high power LED Room and Spot Lighting!
It’s incredible what you can make with some parts!

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Here’s a cool Tux droid robot for all your Linux robotics pleasures!

Tux Droid is a first generation 2.4 GHz wireless robot specially built for Linux®.

Tux Droid will be your favorite smart companion. Connect him to your PC and make him flap his wings, dance around, talk, blink his eyes, and all the other stuff you can imagine…

• Let Tux Droid dance when you receive an e-mail
• Program Tux Droid as a guard dog to scare away intruders
• Program Tux Droid as a wake-up clock
• Take Tux Droid to your bathroom to listen to the news broadcast
• Program Tux to be a remote control for your PC, activating multimedia applications
• Program Tux Droid to function as a wireless VOIP phone
• Or just show Tux Droid around to impress your buddies.

So hackers challenge your programming skillz !

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Here’s a cool blending night DIY, very simple and easy to do with your Picaxe. Picaxe is a very
cheap microcontroller you can do a lot of cool stuff like this…

had a few multicolor LEDs laying around and wanted to whip up a color-blending nightlight. I built 2 devices, each in its own 20 pin DIP socket without soldering. A 3-pin header is included so I can reprogram the light on-the-fly if desired. On my first build, I used wire-wrap. The next one used multiple wires pushed into the socket. A bit more difficult, but no wire-wrapping or soldering necessary.

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Check out this function generator you can make if you don’t want to spend tons of hundred dollar
bills on a real one.

Have a look at this professional function generator for example. Nuxie has put together a nice simple function generator built around the XR2206 chip. Have a look at all of the project details here.

In this guide I will show you how to build your own Function Generator. Including component selection, designing the circuit, breadboarding, PCB layout, homemade PCB manufacture through to the finished product.

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