Author Archives: Richard Baguley

Home-made Adjustable Knife Jig

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When sharpening a knife, it is critical to have the knife at the right angle. A knife jig handles this for you, letting you focus on getting the edge right. Y

ou could just buy one, but where’s the fun in that? [origamimavin] decided to make his own adjustable knife jig using bits he bought from the hardware store for $27, and which you might have in your junk pile. Fortunately for us, he’s written up the process in excellent detail, explaining the how and why of each step.

He used a couple of tools that you might not have …read more

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Tracking Airplanes From An Autonomous Boat

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Airplane tracking systems like FlightRadar24 rely on people running radios that receive the ADS-B signal and forward the data on to them. That doesn’t work so well in the middle of the ocean, though: in spots like the mid-Atlantic, there are no islands to speak of.

So, the service is now experimenting with a new approach: putting an ADS-B radio onto an autonomous boat. The boat is a Wave Glider from Liquid Robotics, an autonomous boat that harvests the power of the waves to run propulsion, guidance, and its payload. In this case, that payload includes an ADS-B receiver and …read more

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Raspberry Pi Walkie Talkie Mumbles To Friends

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His kids wanted walkie talkies, so [Daniel Chote] built one. The TalkiePi is a neat project built around a Raspberry Pi running Mumble, the open-source voice chat system that his kids can share with their siblings and friends.

It’s easy enough to choose the Raspberry Pi, and Mumble is pretty well known. But what’s the easiest way you can think of to add microphone and speakers to the RPi? We applaud [Daniel’s] choice to equip it with the guts of a USB speakerphone. Mumble lets you choose voice activation or keyboard input — in this case an added button makes …read more

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10,000 Lumen Sunrise Lamp Curses the Darkness

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Some of us need a bit of help to get up in the mornings. This can come in the form of a sunrise lamp, which simulates the light of the sunrise to fool our poor sleep-deprived brains into waking up in the depths of winter. [Lincoln Johnson] found the ones he tried were not bright enough to wake him, so he decided to build his own: a 10,000-lumen monster that can wake him up from across the room.

It uses a lot of LEDS: 5 meters of 5630 LED strip, which pulls a circuit bending 72 watts when running at …read more

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Commanding Kerbals With A Physical Interface

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Kerbal Space Program will have you hurling little green men into the wastes of outer space, landing expended boosters back on the launchpad, and using resources on the fourth planet from the Sun to bring a crew back home. Kerbal is the greatest space simulator ever created, teaches orbital mechanics better than the Air Force textbook, but it is missing one thing: switches and blinky LEDs.

[SgtNoodle] felt this severe oversight by the creators of Kerbal could be remedied by building his Kerbal Control Panel, which adds physical buttons, switches, and a real 6-axis joystick for roleplaying as an Apollo …read more

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Make a Smart(ish) Watch From An Old Cell Phone

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Looking for a fun junk box hack? Have one of those old Nokia phones that (in contrast to your current smartphone) just won’t give up the ghost? Tinkernut has a nice hack for you: making a smart watch from an old cell phone. Specifically, this project details how to make a smart watch that displays time, date, incoming calls and texts from a Nokia 1100 cell phone display and a few other bits.

This 3-video series covers how to extract the display, connect it to an Arduino and conecting that to an Android phone over Bluetooth. We’ve seen a few …read more

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Planespotter Spots Planes, Tracks Destinations

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Ever looked up in the sky and wondered where all of those planes above you were going? [Daniel Eichhorn] no longer has to, thanks to his ESP8266-based Planespotter.

He built this nifty device to grab the details of the flights he sees taking off from Zurich airport. It’s a neat build, running on an ESP8266 that receives ADS-B data from ADS-B Exchange. This service allows you to query the ADS-B data with a specific location.

[Daniel]’s plane tracker sends a query to ADS-B exchange for flights in his location and below a certain height (so he sees ones that are …read more

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Making A Networked 32X32 LED Panel Case

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[Adam Haile] of [Maniacal Labs] is at it again, whipping up some LED weirdness. This project is smaller than most of his work, though: he has made a nice case that holds a 32X32 LED matrix screen, the controller, and a Raspberry Pi. Check out the build and a brief demo in the video below.

This nice 3D printable design, called the Jumbo1K, would be a good starting point if you are looking to make something with one of these screens, as it provides easy access to all of the ports on the Pi for programming, debugging and networking the …read more

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Add USB OTG To A USB Thumb Drive

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Every hacker has a USB thumb drive on their keyring, filled with backup files and a way to boot up a broken computer. One feature that most are missing though is USB On The Go (OTG) support, which allows a USB device to act as a USB host, connecting to devices like cell phones and tablets.

That can be added with the addition of a USB OTG adapter, though, and [usbdevice] has produced a nice how-to on soldering one of these permanently into a USB thumb drive to create a more flexible device. It’s a simple solder-something-on-something-else hack, but it …read more

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First 360-degree Video From An Amateur Rocket?

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Space. The final 360-degree frontier. These are the voyages of the Portland State Aerospace Society (PSAS), whose ongoing mission is to seek out new civilizations and launch rockets at them. For their latest adventure, they stuck a 360-degree video camera into their rocket. The resulting video is spectacular, from the pre-launch drama of an attack by a giant bee to the parachute release. It also works in Google Cardboard or Oculus Rift through the YouTube viewer.

The 360-degree video was made from video captured by five GoPro cameras stuck inside a custom-built module mounted inside the rocket body, then stitched together …read more

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