Have a look at this beautiful Mini Acrylic Tesla Coil Project that our friend Daniel Eindhoven from Megavolts.nl put together. The build detail on this project might even rival the MV CoilMaster Mark1 Coil Gun!

"A small TeslaCoil fully made of acrylic plastic. The cool thing about this is that every part is transparent. This coil is driven by the power supply of my large DC Teslacoil. Total height 44cm, max output voltage +- 380.000 Volts (57cm arc length)."

There is some great innovation coming out of the Elevator Space Race. The University of Saskatchewan’s Space Design Team has been in it from the start and has some promising technology. The video describes the monumental task quite well. It goes to show that with some prize money on the line a task as challenging as the space elevator is something that many will choose to pursue.

Via: Space Elevator Games

"The University of Saskatchewan Space Design Team (USST) is a team of highly motivated physics and engineering students and professionals. Building on a tradition of success, we aim to go higher and faster! The engineering challenges are great, requiring the skills of a variety of disciplines. Our success to date has relied on a multi-disciplinary approach, and expanding that approach can only make us better. Our climber makes use of solar cells to receive beamed power, and has an incredibly light superstructure. Although light, the compact design allowed us to handle wind quite well. The robot’s brain (the logic needed to follow the rules) is a microcontroller, programmed by U of S students. As the competition becomes more intense, the limitations of individual spotlights are becoming apparent."

The R1 Radio reminds me of a roller ball mouse without the roller ball. When you move it up and down you control the volume, right and left adjusts the tuning. We have seen some other fun music players that use physical movement to interact with them, I think there is a use for this technology other than just the cool novelty factor.

Via: OhGizmo and Dvice

"By using a wheel structure user can control the radio by physical movement. The ‘R1’ allowed users to turn gadget on or off and to control volume and tuning simply by physically rolling the radio forward, backward and sideways. Functionally, by using bevel gear system, I could increase a tuning range more than four times wider than before. There were too many channels in a narrow display before."

The sponsor this week is Dino Direct, they have a ton of cool stuff and best of all shipping is free so the price you see is what you pay!  They will be providing a $20 gift certificate to the winner of the contest. If you couldn’t guess my favorite category is the Tool category.

No emails this time, we are going to do another Guess what this isn’t contest since we had lots of fun with the last one! Simply reply in the comments with your guess at what this device isn’t AND let us know what you would get from Dino Direct with a $20 gift certificate, please include item links so we can see what you found. Make your entry funny, crazy, weird… Just use your imagination. You can enter more than once if you come up with more than one thought. With a short vote the best comment will win the prize.

This contest will run from November 7 - November 13, 2009 . Ending time is based on central standard time.

Have a look at my first comment for an example entry.

Below is the items I would get if I had $20 to spend at Dino Direct.

Vacuum Pick and Place Pen.

ESD Tweezers, made in Switzerland.

ESD Brush.

Solder Wick.

High Temperature Tape.

Adapter card that converts the mini SD cards into a standard SD size.

Pen holder with time and temperature.

This 5kV Induction Gun can shoot aluminum rings with some intense force. I have seen flying ring toys before which fly nice and straight. I wonder if the ring design is better than the typical bullet shaped projectiles we see on most of these guns.

"First portable induction accelerator in Russia. Capacitor energy 500j 5kV voltage, ring speed about 200m/s "

One way to learn lots about a protocol is by implementing a bit banged version. Openschemes shares with us his experimentation with the Arduino and the FT232 chip.

"We’ve been considering the synchronous bit bang mode of the FT232R for an upcoming project. The first steps towards something like this are always to build up a little debug board or test bench that can be used for debug and tweaking while the real boards are in fab. Luckily for us, the Arduino board contains an FT232R ripe for the hacking. For most users, all their dreams are fufilled by avrdude-jtag, which will allow them to reprogram the bootloader on the Arduino Atmega. As you may know, four of the FT232R’s GPIO pins are brought out to an unpopulated header on the Arduino board. The first (and easiest) job is to solder in a set of header pins for future connections."

Limitless Boredom has designed his own version of the Keepon Robot. There have been other Keepon clones out there but I must say that this one made with helicopter RC parts works quite good.

Thanks Ruyck.

PJMonty from SoCalHalloween sure knows how to rig up some great animatronics! The bird and talking skull are funny and spooky at the same time! This project was entered in the Halloween Project Contest, which by the way there is still time to enter.

Via: HG Forum

"The electronics consist of two custom circuit boards I designed. The bottom one (most of which is obscured) contains the micro-controller and memory. It talks to the host PC via a serial port and has animation moves streamed to it on the fly. The top board has another micro-controller and is responsible for handling the time critical work of controlling the actual RC servos. It also has some interface circuitry on it for things like the LCD. Partially visible on the right is the power supply which powers both the circuitry and the servos."

SoCalHalloween - "Small Candy" from SoCalHalloween on Vimeo.

Hacked Gadgets has been asked to provide a paid non-biased opinion of this technology.

The GPS Tracking Key Pro is the latest product by LandAirSea Systems. They have been making GPS devices since 1994 so they’re not new to this industry. There is a laundry list of features that make this device quite appealing. Since this device is meant to allow covert tracking, size is very important. As you can see in the picture the device is tiny! The main bulk of the system is the two batteries that power it. Even with only two AA batteries it can still operate for up to 80 hours. Depending on the application I was thinking that may be a bit limiting but I see that you can also connect it directly to a vehicles battery with an optional cable.

Since this device has been built with covert tracking in mind the internal GPS antenna doesn’t require a clear sky view of the GPS satellites, in fact you can stick this unit in the glove box and it will still work.

When you are ready to see where the GPS tracking key has gone you need to plug it into a computer and run the custom software that comes with the device. You are then able to see where the device has been graphically on a map. If you are old school you can also just read a text printout. After having a look at the sample text printout I can think of lots of great uses for this. Small business owners need to keep a vehicle log to write-off vehicle expenses. The text log shows you by address where you have driven and it gives you the exact distance between the locations. This way it would be very simple to have a quick look at this every few days and determine what mileage was for business use.

Piezoelectric elements can be used to make sound or detect sound. Steve Hoefer has made a Knock Lock, which is a device that can listen to knocks on the door. If the sequence of knocks is the same as the recorded knock sequence it unlocks the deadbolt on the door. Steve was the guy who also made the Dice Reading Machine.

Via: Zedomax

"While working on another project I ran across the Arduino knock sensor tutorial. Sensing a single knock is a great little project for learning about microcontrollers, but what about sensing specific knocks? Seeeeecret knocks? And if we could detect a secret knock, shouldn’t it unlock a door? If you can’t tell by looking this was cobbled together from spare stuff around the lab, it’s not much more than a piezo speaker, a tiny gear reduction motor, and an Arduino. And PVC pipe."