This home is heated by a wood stove in the winter, which also produces hot water. But the other three seasons it’s an electric water heater that does the work. This latest hack is a solar collector meant to take over the hot water production work for the house. it uses basic building materials and rudimentary construction skills, making it much more approachable than trying to make electricity from the sun.

It’s really just a wood box with a glass lid. The inside has been painted black, and the black tubing that snakes through it holds the water. A three-way valve lets the homeowner patch into the hot water reservoir. The collector is lower than the reservoir, so the heated water makes its way back into the tank as cooler water takes its place. Not bad for an entirely passive system!

[Thanks Minde]

We used to have a store. Actually, it was just me, pumping out shirts and stickers from my garage.  However, I found that over time, I wasn’t particularly happy with the quality of the shirts. The vinyl would crack over time, and I wasn’t the fastest person in the world to get an order out the door. I shut down the store because I didn’t want to too poorly in the name of hackaday.  I’ve had TONS of emails asking me to turn it back on.

Today, we’re turning on another store. It isn’t fancy. It isn’t amazing. It should, however, provide higher quality products than we had before, and more different products to choose from. I’ve put shirts, coffee mugs, and stickers in so far. The graphics were all done correctly for each format, so they should turn out very nice.When you buy Hackaday merchandise, you help ensure Hackaday will stick around as long as possible.

Now, lets talk a little bit about where we should go from here.

1. Merchandise
Yes, we know we could go get shirts screen printed. I would rather have custom Merchandise made for us that we could inspect and keep in stock. That is a “one day” kind of thing that we will have to work towards. Right now we have virtually no budget for this and I don’t trust us to provide the customer service a retail store demands. We’re too busy looking for cool stuff to write!

2. Tools/components
Someone always mentions that we should sell tools.  I don’t have a problem with it, but it doesn’t make sense to me either. You all know that we don’t make tools. The tools you would buy from us would just be other people’s tools that we bought first. We think the people we know who sell tools probably do a better job with customer service and order fulfillment than we would.  Maybe someone has an angle on this I haven’t thought of.

3.Kits
We’ve discussed this and every time, we get excited. We would love to come up with some kits to sell. We have a few ideas floating around but have to work out some things first. This will most likely be our next step. We would be interested in hearing your ideas and input on this one.  Obviously, these would be on the simpler side. If any of our writers put in the amount of time and effort necessary for a huge project, they’d probably branch out on their own.

So that’s it for now. Go buy a shirt and a coffee mug. We appreciate it.  Oh, and post pics of your stuff in our forums or on the Hackaday flickr pool… or on every wall of every building of your town square.

One of the really cool things about the Nintendo Wii when it was first introduced was the ability to play GameCube games on it. This made it a no-brainer for a lot of folks to upgrade. But as the heyday of legacy systems fades into history, Nintendo decided this was no longer a selling point and stopped populating those components. The good new is, if you don’t mind a lot of PCB soldering you can add your GameCube bits to a modern Wii motherboard.

[Deadlyfoez] launched a raffle to raise enough money to buy a new version of the hardware (we guess the raffle prize is the modded console). He then proceeded to solder on four GameCube controller ports and a memory card reader. There are also a number of passive surface mount components that need to be added. But as the video after the break shows, once in place the functionality reappears on the software side.

If you want to see what kind of abuse you’re causing your body when out on those single-track rides this system is just the thing. It’s an Arduino data logger that [Wdm006] takes along on the rides with him. When he gets back home, a Python scripts captures the data dump and graphs it. It may sound like a neat trick, but he’s got something planned for that information.

The enclosure mounts to the stem of his bike. It houses an Arduino board with a data logging shield of his own design. That shield holds an SD card for storage, and breaks the other pins out as screw terminals. Right now there’s an accelerometer on the front fork, and some method of recording wheel speed. This is the research phase of an anti-lock brake system (ABS) he plans to build for mountain biking. No word on what hardware he’ll use for that, but we can’t wait to see how it comes out.

We love badges. And we’ve really got to thank [Charliex] for taking the time to write a huge post about this year’s LayerOne badges, especially since they’ve got their backs up against the deadline for pulling everything together in time.

Here it is, the stock badge on the left, with an add-on shield on the right. Now the original intent was to make this badge the chassis of an RC car. [Charliex] chewed through his development time trying to source toy cars that could be gutted for parts that would mount easily on the badge. This looked promising at first, but turned out to be folly. Instead what we have here is an Arduino compatible board with an RF transmitter which can be cut off and used separately if you wish. Attendees will be able to use the badge to take control of the toy cars (cases of them have been shipped to the conference), with the option to use the USB functionality to facilitate automation.

So what about stopping bullets? There is a bug in the module [Charliex] used to export the board design from Eagle. They came back from the fab house as 0.125″ substrate. That’s pretty beefy!

The conference is this weekend… better get on that!

Give your garden lights a little bit more life by changing out the LEDs. In the process, you can also choose a different color if you like. It really is as simple as cracking it open and replacing the stock LED, but a bit of a change may also prolong the stored charge.

These garden lights consist of a small solar cell and an LED, both controlled by a small PCB powered from a NiMH rechargeable battery. Sure, you could try to put in a battery that has more potential, but if you replace the single LED with two of them in series, it drops the current consumption and increase the battery life. Just make sure to use super bright LEDs and the intensity change will not be all that noticeable. That comes partly from the fact that our eyes don’t detect intensity changes as well when a light is already very bright. And since it’s two LEDs, mixing colors is an option as we see above.

[Thanks Ken]

[Christopher] piped up in our comments on a recent post about using laptop touch pads in other things, noting that he had done this on his Ultimate Calculator Version 2. What he’s done is upgraded his TI-83+ calculator to house a number of improvements and customizations. It now has a stronger RGB backlight so he can illuminate his screen in whatever color strikes his mood. He also integrated a PS2 port so he could use an external mouse/ keyboard. What brought this to our comments though, was the embedded laptop touchpad on the back that is also fully functional. He topped it all off with a rather pleasing paint job as well.

The funny thing is, we caught a glimpse of this thing in a previous post about networking these calculators.

While it may only be [ioan]‘s first ‘real build’, we’re loving his DIY teardrop travel trailer built from the ground up.

The trailer started its life as a Super Duty Harbor Freight utility trailer that [ioan] managed to put together in a day. After mounting a wooden frame on the utility trailer, [ioan] fabricated the body of the trailer out of 1/2 inch plywood for the exterior, hard foam as insulation, and gorgeous 5mm plywood for the interior. To finish off his build, [ioan] cemented aluminum sheets to the exterior for a wonderful Airstream aesthetic.

[ioan] even went so far as to install a small kitchen in the back of his trailer that includes a small propane stove and (a limited supply of) running water. It’s an excellent build that really shows off his craftsmanship, and something we wouldn’t mind spending a weekend in.

[ioan] put up an Instructable of his build that showcases the construction including all the electrical work of wiring up his trailer with LED lights and 12 volt power jacks.

There’s a certain mystique about old home movies and 8mm film; whether it’s footage from a family gathering from 40 years ago or a stop-motion animation you made when you were 12, there’s an immediacy for film that the VHS tapes from your family’s first camcorder can’t match. [Teslas Moustache] has been getting into 8mm cameras and projectors, so when he came across a 8mm/super 8 projector that needed a bulb, he knew he had a worthwhile project on his hands.

To replace the burnt-out and very expensive to replace incandescent bulb, [Teslas] sourced a very bright star LED from Jameco. This 1 Watt LED puts out more than enough light to project a frame of film onto a screen and fortunately doesn’t get as hot as the stock bulb.

To power the LED, [Teslas] used a cell phone charger powered from the 120 VAC incandescent socket to supply the requisite 5 Volts at 1 Amp (Ohm’s Law works on coffee) power for the LED. Right now, there’s still the matter of fabricating a nice enclosure to mount the LED and charger in the bulb socket, but once [Teslas] figures that out, he’ll have a very nice 8mm projector on his hands.

[Fred Murphy] has an old Fisher-Price music box/record player that has lost many of its disks over the last 40 years. It’s a very simple device – concentric grooves in a plastic disk have plastic bumps that are picked up by the tines of the record player ‘cartridge.’ Seeing as how this toy is basically a music box, [Fred] figured making his own records would be well within his grasp; he did the reasonable thing and made a Stairway to Heaven disk for a toy music box.

To figure out where to place the ‘bumps’ for the musical tines, [Fred] built a small tool in Visual C# 2010 that allowed him to place notes on a scale and generate the requisite GCode for the disk. After sending this file to his CNC mill, [Fred] had an acrylic disk that played Led Zeppelin on a child’s music box.

Of course, this Instructable wouldn’t be complete without a video demo of Stairway blasting out of this record player. You can check that out after the break.

The Vtech InnoTab is a child-sized tablet computer built for kids. Apart from being the ideal solution to keeping the grubby, sticky hands of nieces and nephews away from proper ‘adult sized’ tablets, it can also serve as a Linux tablet perfect for a few homebrew apps. [Mick] picked up an InnoTab for his son, but after getting BusyBox working, we’re thinking it has become a toy for the father and not the son.

[Mick] cracked open the InnoTab and soldered a few wires to a pair of pins that connect to a TTL level converter and then to a TV. There’s a full Linux shell running on [Mick]‘s new tablet, encouragement enough for him to start porting  ScummVM, the engine behind famous LucasArts point-and-click adventure games of the early 90s.

Right now, it’s still very much a work in progress, but [Mick] has full screen support and a virtual keyboard working; more than enough to enjoy Day of the Tentacle and Sam & Max Hit the Road. After the break you can see the video of [Mick]‘s InnoTab running the much more child-friendly SCUMM adventure Putt Putt Goes to the Moon, something we’re sure his son will love.

It’s not every day one of the builds on Hackaday gets picked up by a big-name publication, and it’s even rarer to see a Hackaday contributor grace the pages of an actual print magazine. Such is the case with [Adam Munich] and his home-built x-ray machine.

We first saw [Adam]‘s x-ray machine at the beginning of this year as an entry for the Buildlounge/Full Spectrum laser cutter contest. [Adam] won the contest, landed himself a new laser cutter, and started writing for Hackaday. Now that [Adam] is gracing the pages of Popular Science, we’re reminded of the story of Icarus, flying too close to the sun.

[Adam]‘s x-ray machine is built around a Coolidge tube, the same type of vacuum tube found in dental x-ray machines. The device is housed in two suitcases – one used as a control panel and graced with beautiful dials and Nixies, the other housing the Coolidge tube and power supply. Proper x-ray images can be taken by pointing a camera at the scintillation screen, allowing [Adam] to see inside hard drives and other inanimate objects.

Sure, it’s a build we’ve seen before but it’s still very cool to see one of Hackaday’s own get some big name recognition.

It doesn’t have four rotors, but this advanced-glider is every bit as impressive as the most complicated of quadrotor offerings. It’s the first glider that can successfully perch on your arm. We can’t help but think back to the owl in the original Clash of the Titans movie.

The team at the Aerospace Robotics and Control Lab of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is happy to show off the test flights they’ve been conducting. We’ve embedded two of them after the break which show the unit landing on this person’s arm, and on the seat of a chair. The image above shows a montage of several frames from the flight, and gives us a pretty good look at the articulated wings. You can seen them both bent in the middle of the flight to zero in on the landing zone. In addition to this there are flaps on the trailing edge of the wings and tail. The flight path is a bit wandering since the glider has no vertical tail to stabilize it.

Now if they can make it harvest power from overhead electrical lines they’ve got a spy-bird which can be dropped from a plane (or from a drone).

[via Technabob]

VIA Technologies, ostensibly in an attempt to compete with the Raspberry Pi (if you can believe all those bloggers out there), is releasing a tiny single board computer called the APC Android PC. The VIA website for the APC is down, so just search Google News for all the details.

The specs are somewhat similar to the Raspberry Pi – HDMI out, Ethernet, SD card, and a few USB ports – but that’s about where the similarities end. The APC runs a version of Android 2.3 customized for mouse and keyboard input where the RasPi runs Linux. The APC can only display 720p video (compared to the RasPi’s 1080p), and doesn’t have GPIO pins that can be used with Arduino shields.

We’re pretty sure VIA is going after the media center PC market here with a low-power board that can easily stream movies or a season of TV shows over a network. At $50, we’re sure the APC will find a home in a few homebrew devices, MAME machines, and carputers.

If anything, this only portends a whole bunch of single-board ARM/Linux computers riding on the coat tails of the RasPi. That’s awesome no matter how you look at it.

If a $50 Android board doesn’t whet your whistle, VIA also released a Mini-ITX board with 12 hardware serial ports. Hardware serial ports are getting rare nowadays despite how useful they are for embedded applications. 12 (with riser cards, natch) serial ports seems overkill, but we’re sure some Hackaday reader has been looking for this board for a while now.

I am particularly pleased to be announcing SquidFoo, an Art gallery/studio and hackerspace in Springfield Missouri (hackerspaces.org link). For those unaware, this small town is where I’m located (Brad Pitt came from here too!). I would love to take credit for this hackerspace, but I can’t. [Scott Sauer] and [Phil Broussard] created it and reached out to me when they heard I was in town. I’m going to make up for coming late to the party by helping them get organized, and possibly planning some events. You’ll be seeing more of SquidFoo here because this is probably where I’ll be doing future Hackaday projects for a while!

The space is divided into 4 physical areas. There’s the art gallery, the art studio/lounge, the hackerspace or “collaboratory”, and the chopshop. Right now, as you can see in the pictures, there’s quite a mess in the hackerspace and shop area. They just finished cleaning out a rather large basement  ”the fallout shelter” to put all this stuff in, so the workstations should be much more usable in the immediate future. Right now, there are areas for painting, sewing, electronics stations, a 3d printer, the full shop. Some plans for the immediate future include adding an RFID system, automating our lighting, an amateur radio studio, alternative media studio, and there’s a nearly finished RepRap Mendel.

If you’re in the area, please stop by sometime and check it out. As I said, they’re just getting things going so there are only a handful of members. Those few members are kicking some butt though. I ran into [Ryan], aka [Platinumfungi] while he was working on a Metroid helmet prop for an upcoming video. He explains a bit about how it was made in this short clip. You might have heard of him before, he does custom modded classic gaming systems. I know I had seen his Zelda themed NES before.

Remember to send us your hackerspace intro. We don’t care how big or how small you are, Hackaday wants to get the word out to help you grow!