Author Archives: Richard Baguley

Building a Whegged Robot

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[Jaidyn Edwards] is building a robot. This isn’t going to be a normal robot, though, he’s building a whegged robot, inspired by Boston Dynamic’s version of the RHex design.

A wheg (TM) is a curved leg that rotates around a foxed point on one end, driven by a motor. Hence the name: part wheel, part leg. By driving each leg separately, you can keep the robot balanced and push it forwards. This is a complex system to build. Unlike normal wheels or drive systems, you need to know exactly where the leg is to use it properly, as the position …read more

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Arduino Controlled Micro Distillery

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Booze, they say, is one of the major factors that shaped human history. And creating new and faster ways of making booze has always been a big engineering problem, so this project by [Goat Industries] is rather interesting. It’s a completely automated micro-distillery called the NanoStillery.

The whole thing can run unattended, but uploads data on the brewing process for remote monitoring and notification. Given that distilling involves explosive things like alcohol vapor, that’s a big plus. It is all home-made, including the boiler assembled from steel plate and an air-cooled condenser. It’s controlled by an Arduino Mega twinned with …read more

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3D Printed GoPro Toy Car Mount

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There’s been a spate of YouTube videos of people strapping GoPro cameras onto things recently. [Ruiz] at [Adafruit] is looking to contribute to this trend with this tutorial on 3D printing a GoPro Session toy car mount. The entire toy car mount is 3D printed, except for the axles, which are made of the unprinted filament with melted ends to hold the wheels in place.

The part of the mount that fits around the camera is printed in a flexible filament (think Ninjaflex), so it holds on tightly to the GoPro and can be used as a bumper as well. …read more

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IP Over QR Codes

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We’ve seen networks built over some interesting mediums, but QR codes has to be a new one. [Eric Seifert] decided to try to use QR codes to make an IP connection. He used these visual codes to create a bi-directional connection between two camera-equipped computers. He’s a persistent chap, because it works: in one of his videos, he shows an SSH connection between two devices.

He faced a number of challenges on the way. Although there is plenty of code to read QR codes, the data that can be encoded and read from them is limited. There is a binary …read more

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Make Your Eyes Louder With Bluetooth Speaker Goggles

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Your eyes are cool, but they aren’t very loud. You can remedy that with this build from [Sam Freeman]: a pair of Bluetooth speaker goggles. Combine a pair of old welders goggles with a Bluetooth receiver, a small amp and a couple of cheap speaker drivers and you’re well on your way to securing your own jet set radio future.

[Sam] found a set of speaker drivers that were the same size as the lenses of the goggles, as if they were designed for each other. They don’t do much for your vision, but they definitely look cool. [Sam] found …read more

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Make Your Eyes Louder With Bluetooth Speaker Goggles

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Your eyes are cool, but they aren’t very loud. You can remedy that with this build from [Sam Freeman]: a pair of Bluetooth speaker goggles. Combine a pair of old welders goggles with a Bluetooth receiver, a small amp and a couple of cheap speaker drivers and you’re well on your way to securing your own jet set radio future.

[Sam] found a set of speaker drivers that were the same size as the lenses of the goggles, as if they were designed for each other. They don’t do much for your vision, but they definitely look cool. [Sam] found …read more

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3D Printed Moon Phase Clock

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Someone once observed that the moon is a harsh mistress. But that doesn’t mean you can’t keep track of her, specially with this awesome moon phase clock that [G4lile0] designed and built.

It uses a 3D printed moon model combined with a series of LEDs to create the phases. These LEDs are driven by an Arduino that calculates the phase to show, as well as driving a small OLED display that shows the date and time. There is even a party mode for all of those lunar raves that you host.

[G4lile0] has done an excellent job of documenting the …read more

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Make Water Bridges With High Voltages

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It’s generally a bad idea to mix high voltage electricity and water, but interesting things happen if you do. This video from [RWGResearch] shows one of them: water bridging. If you have two water sources (such as two beakers full of very highly distilled water) with a high voltage between them, the voltage can create a gravity defying bridge that flows between them.

The experiment starts with the pouring spouts from two beakers nearly touching each other. Water fills the beakers right up to the spout, but it’s the application of electricity that pulls the bridge between the positive and …read more

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Primes In A Box

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Lots of useful things come in boxes. Shoes, soldering irons and… prime numbers? This simple project from [WhiskyTangoHotel] puts a list of prime numbers in a handy box. Press a button, get a prime.

Sure, it isn’t brain surgery: all that it is happening is that a Raspberry Pi is reading a number from a text file, then showing it on an LCD screen. But it’s well-documented project that shows how to tie together a number of things on the Pi, like writing to an I2C display and using a button to trigger a clean shutdown.

It might be a …read more

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Web Matrix Control Proves Power of ESP8266

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LED matrix projects are all over the place, but this one is interesting for its simplicity: it’s an LED matrix that is driven straight from an ESP8266 board. [Ray] put it together as a quick project for his students to teach the basics of LED programming.

It’s built using a WS2812 LED matrix board he designed himself and his own ESPToy ESP8266 dev board. But the gist of the hardware is simply an ESP8266 and some WS2812’s. Where this gets interesting is with the user interaction side of things. The ESP makes WiFi and web serving easy, and [Ray] has …read more

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