Hacks, Mods & Circuitry: News

This is a nice project that you can continue to work on and modify as you learn more Arduino projects. The Instructable linked below goes through the complete build for the Bluetooth-enabled robot seen in the first half of the video.

At first, it seemed like a clever art installation housed on the web, but now we're not so sure... the Newstweek hack may indeed be legit.

A FGPA is chip that is programmable with the computer to create circuit. It is a totally different type of programmable board compared to an Arduino for example. The Arduino will follow lines of codes to generate the necessary outputs. A FPGA won't however read lines of code, but it is a circuit itself. When the chip is programmed, a series of AND-ports, OR-ports and many others ports are linked together. The FGPA will increase the speed and the possibilities of your designs! I assume that by...

The first steps will always be a little difficult, but that is the way everyone has to live his life. The same is true, when you start programming FPGA-chips. It might be hard to get started, therefore a introduction may be useful. I will explain all the problems you might encounter when you first start. Also a simple first project is included as a guideline throughout the video!

At a certain moment in our lives all of us wanted to be a fire fighter. To simulate that effect, we created a super-awesome siren. With two 555-timer chips and lots of trail and error, we were able to create this awful noise.

make robots WALL.E with low cost. using materials from scrap

Thermistors are used in almost every single device. If you are planning to build a grand new project, let us explain why and how you should use a thermistor !

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In this episode we're using the Tibbo EM1000 to create our ownweb-serving-BPM-sensor!

This video covers the basics of the Arduino and the breadboard.For the code:http://www.mikepieters.com/codes/basicsI.ino

In this tutorial, I'll show you how to use the Arduino to control lights with your own voice!

In this project, I'll show you how to control your projects using Twitter!

Robotic Rubik's Cube solvers are nothing new. We've seen ones that are run on Android, made of LEGO Mindstorms, and faster than the world record holder. The most recent Rubik's Cube robot making the news was made by high school student James Watson as a school project, but it's ended up getting a lot more attention than that.

You can use Twitter to print Instagram photos, track news and weather events, or even remotely shut down your computer, and if you're familiar with IFTTT, there's no shortage of ways your account can help automate your life.

Getting pulled over sucks, even when you're in a normal car. Just imagine how these teenagers felt when they were pulled over for driving their wooden car without a license! They also got a citation for not having a speedometer or side indicator lights, but if that's all that's keeping their DIY vehicle from being street legal, I'm already impressed.

Who needs to go to bartending school when you've got the Inebriator to mix your favorite drinks for you? Want a cosmopolitan? No problem. Press a button. Want a tequila sunrise? Sure thing. Press a button. As long as you've got a good supply of liquor and mixers, the Inebriator is at your command.

You've probably seen the classic fruit battery science experiment a thousand times, but I doubt you've ever seen it turned into an art project! Photographer Caleb Charland uses everyday objects like apples, coins and vinegar to create makeshift batteries, then takes these gorgeous long exposure photos.

Considering how often many of us fly on commercial airlines, the idea that a hacker could somehow interfere with the plane is a very scary thought. It doesn't help to learn that at Defcon, a researcher found that the Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B), transmissions that planes use to communicate with airport towers are both unencrypted and unauthenticated.

If you didn't think you could make a high speed photography trigger or hack together some creepy googly eyeballs for Halloween, then you've got another think coming, because learning how to use Arduino just got easier thanks to Jody Culkin and her wonderful comic book introduction to the Arduino platform (and electronics projects in general).

Sometimes an "analog" result is highly satisfying when the means for producing it is just the opposite. Enter Niklas Roy's "Electronic Instant Camera" project. The endeavor combines an analog black and white videocamera with a thermal receipt printer. The outcome is something in between a Polaroid camera and a digital camera. Like the olden days, the subject must sit still for a quite a while—3 full minutes—as their image is recorded and printed directly on a roll of receipt paper.

If you're lucky, your digital camera has a built-in intervalometer that lets you operate the shutter regularly at set intervals over a period of time. Why would you be lucky? Because you can create some very awesome time-lapse videos, like the horribly beautiful eruption of a volcano or vivid star trails in the night sky. You can capture the stunning display of the northern lights or even document the rotting of your favorite fruit.

Meet DareDroid: sexy nurse, geek couture and mobile bartender, engineered into an all-in-one technologically advanced garment. Created by fashion designer Anouk Wipprecht, hacker Marius Kintel, and sculptor Jane Tingley, the team calls themselves the Modern Nomads (MoNo), and their series of garments fall into Wipprecht's invented family of "Pseudomorphs". Pseudomorphs are  tech-couture pieces that transform into fluid displays—which is exactly what DareDroid does.

Looking to be the world's best violinist or fastest banjo player? If you didn't start practicing when you were a kid, learning a new stringed instrument is extremely challenging. But an upcoming device may change all of that, if you don't mind being shocked by 28 different electrodes.

Nobody could predict the success of Microsoft's Kinect, not even Microsoft themselves. So, it was quite a surprise when it ended up earning a Guinness World Record for fastest-selling consumer electronics device, and an even bigger surprise to see people buying one that didn't even own an Xbox 360.

Got a knack for speeding? Like running red lights? Believe or not, the police have better things to be doing than pulling you over, like catching real criminals. That's why more and more cameras are popping up at known speeding zones and on street corners—so the cops can clean up the streets, compared to just ticketing them.

Our hacked Kinect series has demonstrated amply how the Kinect is changing the worlds of business, art, medicine and robotics. But where does it go from here? That will be determined by the thousands of dedicated DIYers out there doing work like you've seen here over the last week.

It's remarkable that a gaming device (from Microsoft, no less) designed for geeky gamers has incited broad innovation in medicine and robotics. But that Kinect has captured the imagination of hackers-with-MBAs-in-mind is downright amazing.

E Ink technology is nothing short of amazing. It recently contributed to the world's first bend-sensitive flexible smartphone, and now it's capable of something even cooler, not to mention astonishingly simpler—flashing digital displays on cloth.

Were you horrified when Gwyneth Paltrow's head ended up in a box in Se7en? Do you share Harrison Ford's opinion that Han Solo should have died in Return of the Jedi? Think Kurt Russell could have handled aliens better in The Thing? Well, sorry—you're out of luck. There's nothing you can do to prevent William Wallace's beheading or Carrie's mayhem. But thanks to MyndPlay, controlling the plot to future films is totally possible.

As a kid, my favorite thing to do at the Natural History museum was a midday stop, when my family strolled past an antiquated looking vending machine in the museum's musty basement. The Mold-A-Rama machine was oddly shaped, George Jetson-esque, and spewed out made-to-order, brightly colored plastic dinosaurs. There was such joy in watching the liquid wax pour into the mold, and then eject a warm, custom toy—well worth the dollar or two demanded.

You're walking down the street, minding your own business. Then you see it—a large, bright fireball in the near distance. A tremendous heat wave speeds towards you at one thousand miles an hour, and before you can think, before you can even blink, the extremely heated wind pushes right through you. Your skin melts, your eyes liquefy—your face disappears into the wind. Before you know it, your pancreas collide with what's left of the person next to you, your duodenum is dissolving faster than it...

Matt Reed, a web developer at Nashville interactive ad agency Redpepper, built a massive, real life Facebook Like "button" out of Legos, which lights up whenever someone clicks Like on his Facebook page. The programmer loves LEGOs, and draws an affinity between the legendary building blocks and engineering: "[Legos] are great for prototyping physical objects. I don't manufacture things, but I do click blocks together. Plus, most things I deal with on a daily basis are pixelized. Legos are some...

Holy… Lord, help us all—this isn't CG, it's for real. Meet Geminoid DK, the latest spawn from Osaka University Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro's legion of ultra-realistic Androids.

If you dig case mods and Resident Evil, it's fair to say you'll find Ron L. Christainson's nothing short of epic. Inspired by the renown video game and movie, Ron—an artist and PC tech from Seattle—has already spent a year constructing the mod from scratch, and still has a couple months of work ahead of him.

Too lazy to take your phone out of your pocket? If so, then here's a must-have: a customizable inPulse wristwatch that can check into Facebook Places. Created by inPulse designer Eric Migicovsky, the hacked watch uses Bluetooth to pull Facebook Places from a connected Android smartphone. The app sends real time latitude and longitude stats from the smartphone's GPS to Facebook, which then transmits nearby places to the watch, navigable by a one button interface.