This is Chippu, a robot that [Achu] has been working on for some time. His most recent addition was to give the robot the ability to respond to voice commands. This is accomplished using a variation of the open source Continuous Speech Recognition package called Julius. The package depends on two main parts, a set …
Robot takes voice commands via open source CSR
Power Wheels Jeep makes an awesome R/C car
[Will] from RevoltLab wrote in to share part one of a cool project he is working on right now, a remote-controlled mobile rocket launcher. Before you run off and call the Department of Homeland Security, he says that the launcher will be used for personal hobby rockets, which are typically considered mostly harmless. The first …
Building an EEPROM programmer
Behold this ATtiny85 based EEPROM programmer. It seems like a roundabout way of doing things, but [Quinn Dunki] wanted to build to her specifications using tools she had on hand. What she came up with is an ATtinyISP USB programmer, pushing data to an ATtiny85, which then programs an EEPROM chip with said data. The …
Universal Commodore 64 cartridge speeds up demo production
As a life long lover of his venerable Commodore 64, [Frank] was looking for a way to speed up the development time when writing C64 demos. His solution is a universal C64 cartridge that will connect to a PC over a USB port. The board is powered by a CLPD and a microcontroller loaded with code …
Asterisk Hack Post-mortem
Having your production Asterisk-based phone system hacked is no fun, as I have learned from first-hand experience over the past few days. Even the best of IT administrators taking ever security precaution in the book dreads the day their critical serve…
Unshredding Paper
[Roel] had read that people won the DARPA shredder challenge, but that their technology was kept a secret, interested in this concept he also remembered an episode of the X-Files where they had reconstructed shredded paper using a computer system. Unlike most computer based TV show BS this did not seem to be too far …
Crank out the jams with [Dino]‘s Fuzz Face
Weekly Hack a Day feature [Dino] is back again, this time with his very own guitar pedal. It’s modeled on a three-transistor Fuzz Face clone and sounds very good in our humble opinion. Fuzz pedals were some of the first guitar pedals on the market, and for good reason. Their easy construction and simple theory …
Print huge stuff with the Makerbot Replicator
The folks at MakerBot Industries are introducing their new 3D printer at CES this week. It’s called the MakerBot Replicator and features dual heads for 2-color prints and a huge build envelope for huge objects From [Bre Pettis]‘ introduction video (available after the break), the build area is about 9x6x6 inches, compared to the about four-inch cube-sized …
Build an intervalometer with these simple fabrication techniques
[L] just finished building this intervalometer and his verbose documentation of the project has a little bit of everything. The fabrication uses common prototyping materials, and simple skills that are easy to master even for the beginner. The hardware is based around an ATmega8 microcontroller. After snooping around the Internet [L] wanted to see if …
Rainbow Machine livens up any photograph
[Shameel Arafin, Sean McIntyre, and Reid Bingham] really dig rainbows. Going by the moniker the “RainBroz”, the trio built a portable display that can be used to add cool light painting effects to pictures. The group brings their Rainbow Machine all over the place, including parties, gatherings, and random spots on the street. Anyone is …
