Collaborate Disseminate
Quite a few makers try and create devices helpful to others – today’s hack, Rocket Switch, is a lovely example of that. It’s a design by [Neil Squire] of [Makers …read more Continue reading Rocket Switch – Accessibility Done With Elegance
Anansi in African folktale is a trickster and god of stories, usually taking physical form of a spider. Anansi’s adventures through oral tradition have adapted to the situation of people telling those stories, everything ranging from unseasonable weather to living a life in slavery. How might Anansi adapt to the …read more
Prolific maker [Sean Hodgins] has taken the wraps off of his latest one-day build, and as usual, it takes the kind of spare parts most people reading Hackaday will have in their parts bins and turns it into something fun and useful. This time around, he takes a bunch of spare arcade-style buttons he had from a previous project and combines them with an Adafruit Trinket (SAMD21 flavor) to make a USB input device for his computer.
[Sean] uses 1/4 inch acrylic to make the case, though he does mention that it could just as easily be 3D printed. But …read more
Depending on how you look at things, the holidays could be seen as either an excuse to spend money or an excuse to get creative. We imagine many Hackaday readers would rather head to their workbench than the mall when it comes time for gift giving, and [Sean Hodgins] is no different. He came up with the idea of hiding geocaches around his nephew’s neighborhood and building him a locator device to find them. The locator itself is intended to grow with his nephew, allowing him to reprogram it or use its parts for something completely different down the road. …read more
Continue reading Geocache Locator Is The Gift That Keeps On Giving
I’m working on a Skyrim quest marker. You probably know what this is even if you never have played the game. When a character or location in the game relates to a quest, an arrow floats over it so you don’t miss it. If it’s a book, the book has the arrow floating over it. If it’s a person, it floats over that character’s head. It is that quest marker I aim to re-create.
I sat down in front of my sketchbook and drew the basic parameters. I wanted it to be approximately to scale to the human/elf/orc heads it …read more
Who wants warm drinks? Well, coffee drinkers, we guess. Other than them, who wants warm drinks? Tea drinkers, sure. How about room temperature drinks? No one, that’s who. It’s silly to buy a refrigerator to cool down a single drink, so what option are you left with? Ice cubes? They’ll dilute your drink. Ice packs and a cooler? Sure, they’ll keep your drinks cold, but they’re hardly cool are they? No, if you want a cold drink the cool way, you build a thermoelectric cooler. And if you want to build one, you’re in luck, because [John Park] has a …read more
Step right up! What would a Makerfaire be without some carnival games? And being a Makerfaire, they could of course be modernized versions. In [avishorp]’s case, he made a series of games that test your speed and look very much like the old strongman game, aka high striker or strength tester.
In the strongman game, you smash a lever with all your might using a hammer. A puck on the other end of the lever then shoots up a tower, hopefully high enough to hit a bell, winning you a prize. In [avishorp]’s games the puck, tower and bell are …read more
Continue reading Modern Strongman Games Test Your Speed Instead
Anyone who regularly presents to an audience these days has known the pain of getting one’s laptop to work reliably with projection hardware. It’s all the more fraught with pain when you’re hopping around from venue to venue, trying desperately to get everything functioning on a tight schedule. [Seb] found that the magic keystrokes they used to deal with these issues no longer worked on the Macbook Pro Touchbar, and so a workaround was constructed in hardware.
The build itself is simple – an Adafruit Trinket serves as the brains, with a meaty 12mm tactile button used for input. The …read more
