[ften] was having plenty of fun running Android on his HP Touchpad, but he soon discovered that the tablet’s micro USB port didn’t provide enough juice to his peripherals when running in host mode. He started digging around and found the perfect means of providing the extra power while maintaining the device’s stock appearance.

He pried the tablet apart and installed a small DC step up converter in an empty space located behind the Touchpad’s dummy SIM slot. After wiring the converter to the battery terminals, he installed a micro USB adapter in the empty slot, which fit perfectly after a bit of sanding.

He hacked together a USB Y-cable to pull power from his new USB jack, while retaining the existing data connection through the original USB interface. You can see the results of his work in the video below, and while [ften] hasn’t said how much his mod affects the Touchpad’s battery life, he has confirmed that it will still shut down gracefully once you inevitably sap the battery dry.

Browsing around today, I saw this little kit on kickstarter called Kinetic Creatures.  These flat packed models are made from cardboard and can be assembled without tools. Their mechanical legs are operated either by a simple cam that you turn by hand or by a motorized attachment. I love the basic idea here. This is the kind of thing that my 6 year old would really enjoy doing that also serves to get him into making things (he’d probably insist on motorizing it with scraps, he collects dc motors and has quite a collection).

I did notice that they mentioned using it as a robotic platform, adding custom electronics to the empty space allowed in the body of the animal. This initially got me quite excited, thinking that I could, for $30 have a 1 foot tall quadruped platform that looked awesome, then I realized it can’t turn. I guess I’ll have to hack it a little bit to put separate drives in for each side. That would be a cool upgrade they could offer.

Have any of you tried to do turning with a set of only 4 [jansen] legs before?

So you’ve got a really cool project that requires a wireless controller and a ton of different channels. What are you going to do? Are you going to go pick up an expensive RC controller? Nah, you’re going to build your own. This project makes a generic 20 channel controller for your projects by stuffing an SMDuino and an XBee module inside a ps2 controller.  Unfortunately you lose the force feedback since you have to remove the motors to make space for the extra components and batteries. You do end up with a decently ergonomic and aesthetically pleasing controller though.

[DJ Sures], mastermind behind the EZ-B Bluetooth Robot controller, sent in a really interesting build where he controls a robot with a 1983 TRS-80 computer.

The robot in question is [DJ Sures]‘ adorable WALL-E we’ve seen before. WALL-E is controlled through a Bluetooth connection to a desktop PC with the EZ-Builder hardware and software package.

To get the Trash-80 talking to WALL-E, [Sures] connected a tiny Bluetooth module to the TX pin of the 6402 UART. It’s a very, very simple modification that adds a Bluetooth serial connection to one of the first notebook computers. After syncing the TRS-80 and WALL-E to the computer running EZ-Builder, it’s a piece of cake to make the robot respond to the clanging of a 30-year-old keyboard.

There’s a video of [DJ Sures] going over his build after the break with a wonderful demo of WALL-E freaking out to a little dubstep. Check that out after the break.

These cool looking little bots are part of a fleet of floating water sensors built by The Lagrangian Sensor Systems Laboratory (LSSL) at UC Berkeley, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories (LBNL) and the California Department of Water Resources.

In an emergency such as a levee break, flood, or spill, they can be deployed to gather information in a way that is completely impossible with stationary sensors. These 17″ tall bots can steer with the help of their twin props and communicate water quality information back to the base via cellular communication and short wave radio. They describe the resulting data as being like a “google traffic map” showing speed, depth, and contamination of the water.

There’s a ton of detail on their site, including breakdowns of how the software and hardware are put together. There’s even a bit of the evolution of the hardware showing the abandoned previous models.

When [GG] was 12 years old, he was introduced to BugBooks, the wonderful ‘introduction to digital design’ books from the early 1970s. It has always been a dream of [GG] to build the TTL computer featured in the BugBooks, and now that he has the necessary time and money available to him, the Apollo181 has become a reality.

[GG]‘s computer is built around a 74181 ALU, an exceptionally old-school chip that provides the core of a computer in a neat 24-pin chip. With a 256-byte RAM and a few additional logic chips, [GG]‘s computer is an exceptional piece of engineering able to perform 625,000 instructions per second when clocked at 2.5 MHz.

This isn’t [GG]‘s first homebrew computer build; last year we saw his incredible Z80 minicomputer. Now we can’t wait to see what’s on tap for next year. After the break, you can check out [GG] loading in operands and operators into his computer and letting the Apollo181 churn away on its program.

We’ve seen a lot of builds using electroluminescent wire, usually in the realm of costumes and props. Unfortunately, most electrical engineers don’t deal with blinking and dimming EL wire and panels and any tinkerer trying to control electroluminescence doesn’t have a lot of resources on how to control EL stuff. [ch00f] wanted to fill this knowledge gap, so he build a sound reactive EL panel driver and learned a lot in the process.

Nobody really knows how electroluminescent wire and panels work on a molecular level, but [ch00f] did know that changing the direction of an electric field will cause the EL material to glow. Changing the frequency of this electric field will change the EL material’s brightness, so all [ch00f] had to do was make a variable-frequency EL driver – something that’s a lot harder than it sounds.

We won’t bore you with the details because we  couldn’t do [ch00f]‘s write up any justice. We will skip to the end and tell you [ch00f] was able to make a sound reactive EL panel after a month of work that included making his own transformers and doing a whole bunch of math. You can check out the video of [ch00f]‘s [Tony Stark]-esque EL panel after the break.

[Bill] is back with another fantastic video explaining a piece of intriguing hardware. This time, he’s explaining how a CCD works. For many of us, these things are part of our daily life, but aside from the fact that they capture an image, we don’t put much thought into them. [Bill]  breaks things down in a way that we really enjoy. Fast paced and detailed, yet simple enough for even non-engineers to follow. This time, however, he’s also promoting his companion book which includes tons more information, not only on the construction and function of these ideas, but the underlying scientific principles.

The book, called Eight Amazing Engineering Stories, covers the following items:

• Digital camera imagers
• tiny accelerometers
• atomic clocks
• enriched uranium
• batteries
• microwave ovens
• lasers
• anodized metals

We’re excited about the book and it looks like they’ve worked really hard to deliver a quality product. Great job guys.

When it comes to the subject of hacking, we all have different ideas of what is the coolest. Some prefer bits and solder, some prefer hammers and fire.  [Justin Gray] has built a name for himself doing a broad mixture of the two. Mainly known for his fire sculpture bots, [justin] also has a fab shop where he builds electric motorcycles.

Make magazine recently did a fun interview with some great pictures that show a little bit of [justin's] work.

Justin’s advice for aspiring hackers:

9. What advice do you have for young makers who are inspired by your work?
I think that people who are inspired my work should decide to build and be committed to build and stop listening to the people who insist on going the normal route in life. For kids, keep playing, keep imagining, keep painting and making art.

Join us after the break to see a little bit of robot demolition fun.

After hanging around festivals and burners for a bit I decided that it was finally time to show my stuff and actually build one of these crazy fire cannons everyone is always talking about.  The easiest way to go about this would have been to just follow plans from any given website: replace the valve from an empty grill tank with a 4 way fitting, add an electric solenoid, barrel, low pressure regulator (for the pilot), and then pipe in a regulated propane source. Easy.  The problem My problem with this stock fire cannon design is that it looks like every other fire cannon out there, you have your off the shelf propane bottle and a long thin copper barrel poking up from it, the fire is nice but the cannon is not very fun to look at. Also you can only fit a given size valve, and that does not allow for very much fuel to be released at once. This limits the size of the plume of fire, and where is the fun in that.  The central idea is to add lots of little bottles instead of one big one; I stumbled on a nice pretty anodized aluminum water manifold and the idea grew out from there.

Now, keep in mind I did not just set out to build this crazy thing out of nowhere and slap everything together without laying out some plans. I have been working with the folks over at Frank’s Kitchens for some time, and have been able to pick up a lot of safety practices and general safe handling procedure to keep myself from burning down the entire county. If you want to set out to make a flame effect that is great, but just read up on safety first and try to check out a fire cannon in person… That’s what I did and I still have most of my eyebrows as a result (no arm hair though).

Enough freaking text. Check out the video below for a tour!

Several of us here at Hackaday have discussed how much we’d like to have some tools, like a 3d printer, but just can’t justify the cost. What would we make? Why do we really need one? Why don’t we just bother [Brian Benchoff] who already has one to make us parts instead. That’s usually how the conversation goes.

[Alexander Weber] gave us another little reason to drop in our “list of reasons we need a 3d printer” list with this little hack. He wanted to play with CHDK but found the camera’s battery unable to stay alive for longer than 2 hours. There is a commercially available adapter to allow you to plug into the wall, but the cost was outrageous. At least it is outrageous to someone who already owns a 3d printer. We just need a few hundred more dollars worth of reasons to justify that sweet 3d printer we’ve been pining over.

[via Adafruit]

[Jean] wrote in eager to share his latest project, a standalone temperature logger with USB connectivity. Back in November, [Jean] found himself wanting a temperature logger that was roughly the size of a USB memory stick. What he found on the market was not quite adequate in terms of price or size, so he decided to design his own. His would be the size he wanted and wouldn’t require any software or drivers to run. You simply plug it in, edit the configuration text file to set your intervals, and off you go!

You can follow along through the entire design and fabrication on his site. He’s really great about discussing why he made each decision and how he resolved any errors he ran into. You can download the schematics and source code on his site.

While CRT televisions fall to the wayside as more people adopt flat-panel TVs, the abundance of unused sets gives hacker/artist [Kyle Evans] an unlimited number of analog canvases on which to project his vision. He recently wrote in to share his latest creation which he dubs “de/Rastra”.

The “CRT Performance Interface” as he calls it, is an old analog television which he hacked to display signals created by moving the TV around. Fitted with an array of force sensors, accelerometers, and switches, the display is dynamically generated by the movements of whomever happens to be holding the set.

Signals are sent wirelessly from his sensor array to an Atmel 328 microcontroller with the help of a pair of XBee radios, where they are analyzed and used to generate a series of audio streams. The signals are fed into a 400W amplifier before being inserted into the CRT’s yoke, and subsequently displayed on the screen.

We’re sure [Kyle] is probably trying to express a complex metaphor about man’s futile attempts to impose his control over technology with his project, but we think it simply looks cool.

Check out [Kyle’s] work for yourself in the video below and give us your take in the comments.

Writing for Hackaday isn’t all fun and games; occasionally I need to actually write posts and reply to emails from builders around the globe. Usually, though, I’m knee-deep in a personal project, or just hanging out playing a few video games. Recently I’ve gone off the deep end with Kerbal Space Program, an awesome little space flight simulator set in an alternate reality where everyone is just slightly incompetent.

As it turns out, there’s actually a lot of fairly technical objectives in this game, from performing orbital rendezvous to mapping the surface of another planet. It didn’t take long for me to go off the deep end and start mapping the Kerbal moon and turning it into a 3D object. Check out how I did this after the break.

Kerbal Space Program is a little indie space simulator where you manage your own space race. There’s no real object to the game; is a completely open sandbox where you build your own rockets, launch them into orbit, and hopefully make it to the moon. Think of it as a cartoony version of Orbiter and Eagle Lander 3D. To me, KSP is the perfect mix of the nerdtacular orbital dynamics, Hohmann transfers, and massive explosions.

There’s an amazing amount of user-contributed content for KSP. From 3D printed figurines to a bunch of additional rocket parts to an orbital laser, there’s a lot of fun to be had in this game. One of the most interesting add-ons I’ve found is [Innsewerants] satellite mapping module. The idea behind this mapping module is simple; just attach a radar dish to your spacecraft, launch it into orbit, and a .CSV file of altitude data is generated for celestial body you’re currently orbiting.

Here’s my satellite mapping probe orbiting Kerbal’s Mun

With the command-line tool included with the satellite mapping module, it’s very easy to generate topographical maps of the planets and moons in the Kerbal universe. Since these worlds are procedurally generated, it’s also the only way to do large-scale reconnaissance looking for flat landing areas. After parking my satellite mapping probe in a polar orbit around Kerbal’s Mun, all I had to do was sit back and let the data grow:

Yes, I cheated and put another probe at a 30° inclination to get more data from the mid-latitudes.

After a few days of watching my probe circle around the Mun, I had a fairly complete data set. Now, what to do with it? From the outset of my little topographical endeavor, I thought it would be cool to have a three-dimensional globe of this video game moon. I already had the tools to generate a greyscale height map; all I needed to do was make a 3D mesh out of this data.

I ended up using [William A. Adams]‘s BanateCAD. It’s a tiny little CAD package reminiscent of OpenSCAD. There’s also an example of applying a heightmap to a sphere, so making a Kerbal Mun 3D mesh is as simple as changing a few lines of code.

The result of several days’ data collection from munar orbit

I haven’t gotten around to printing my Munar globe just yet, but I did put the .STL up on Thingiverse, along with the large versions of the color and grayscale topomaps. The data in those heightmaps isn’t completely accurate; despite the data file being about 400 MB, there were still a few small patches without terrain data. I filled those in with a judicious use of the Photoshop ‘smudge’ tool.

I’m also thinking about recreating the fabulous National Geographic moon poster (shown below) using the data from my Kerbal Mun probe. In any event, it was a fun project and a fantastic way to keep from having to deal with the regular Hackaday rigmarole.