Hackaday Links: January 30, 2022

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After all the fuss and bother along the way, it seems a bit anticlimactic now that the James Webb Space Telescope has arrived at its forever home orbiting around L2. …read more Continue reading Hackaday Links: January 30, 2022

Can You Bull’s-Eye A Womprat With A Bean Bag?

As it turns out, a simple game of cornhole — aka, bean bag toss — can have some pretty high stakes. If you lose a round playing on this Death Star trench run cornhole table, the Rebel Alliance may pay the price.

Designed and built by [Hyperdynelabs], the table is set up to play a number of audio clips from the movie with accompanying light effects. Details on how it was made are scant, but there are at least three strips of RGBW LEDs — two that run the length of the board and one inside the exhaust port — …read more

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That’s No Moon! That’s a Virtual Assistant

[Wisecracker] likes how the Amazon Echo Dot works, but he doesn’t like how they sound or how they resemble hockey pucks. A little 3D printing, though, and he transformed the Dot into a credible Death Star. That doesn’t sound very friendly, we guess, so he calls it Alex-Star.

What makes it work is the Death Star’s “superlaser” — the weapon operated by a console that looks suspiciously like some studio video equipment — happens to be about the size and shape of a two-inch speaker. [Wisecracker] added a slot to let the sound out of the second speaker. You can …read more

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Persistence Of Vision Death Star

Death Stars were destroyed twice in the Star Wars movies and yet one still lives on in this 168 LED persistence of vision globe made by an MEng group at the University of Leeds in the UK. While Death Stars are in high demand, they mounted it on an axis tilted 23.4° (the same as the Earth) so that they can show the Earth overlaid with weather information, the ISS position, or a world clock.

More details are available on their system overview page but briefly: rotating inside and mounted on the axis is a Raspberry Pi sending either video …read more

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Easy Toy Hack Makes Floating Death Star

It always seems odd to us that magnetic levitation seems to only find use in big projects (like trains) and in toys. Surely there’s a practical application that fits on our desktop. This isn’t it, but it is a cool way to turn a cheesy-looking levitating globe into a pretty cool Star Wars desk toy.

As projects go, this isn’t especially technically challenging, but it is a great example of taking something off the shelf and hacking it into something else. The globe covering came off, revealing two hemispheres. A circular hole cut out and inverted provides the main weapon. …read more

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