Volcano-dwelling beetle inspires passive cooling coating

Heating and cooling systems are some of the biggest consumers of energy, so finding ways to passively cool buildings and electronics could be a huge saver of money and the environment. A new photonic film could be just the ticket, made with a micro-str… Continue reading Volcano-dwelling beetle inspires passive cooling coating

Star Trek Desktop Viewer In The Palm Of Your Hand!

There’s building small computers — like the Raspberry Pi — and then there’s building small computers — like this Desktop Viewer from Star Trek.

[Monta Elkins] is using a Beetle for this project; it’s an Arduino clone, hosting the ATMega32U4 microcontroller, with a unique feature that allows you to twist connecting wires to secure them to the board. Instead, [Elkins] went with the logical choice of soldering them. For a display, he used a SPI serial OLED 128 x 64 monochrome screen which he has cycling through a number of iconic Star Trek TOS symbols and animations. The images were …read more

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Simple Beetle Robot Uses Smoking Soldering Iron

As robot projects go, [creative ideas km]’s isn’t going to impress many Hacakday readers. Still, as an art project or something to do with the kids, it might be fun. But the reason it caught our interest wasn’t the actual robot, but the improvised soldering iron used in its construction.

The robot itself isn’t really autonomous. It is just a battery, a motor, and a switch. The motor vibrations make the robot scoot around on its bent copper wire legs. Some hot glue holds it all together, but the electrical wiring is soldered.

If you look at the video below, …read more

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