If you have had your computer fall asleep at the worst possible time before you know how frustrating it can be. Todd Harrison from Toddfun.com has come up with a solution. He built a simple battery operated Keyboard Keep Alive Circuit that he stuffed in a cute candy tin shaped like a Wiimote. This circuit closes a relay contact every 25 seconds. Next he connected an interface jack to his keyboard to that the relay can “press” a key when the relay closes. He selected an arrow key but a shift key or something like that would have worked just as well. This circuit would be great to hide inside a keyboard and have it press the caps lock key every 5 or 10 minutes, that would be enough to drive someone mad! If you are looking to solve the same issue there is a device called the mouse jiggler that would do the trick, it is a USB device that slowly (or violently) jiggles the mouse, there is also a neat way to make a DIY jiggler using an optical mouse and a watch.

I have been putting the final touches on the Gear Clock kit which is made up of wooden gears. I have a new appreciation of the effort it takes to make something work well when it is constructed out of wood. MechanicalSculptor makes it look easy! This Parabola project us a true work of art, it’s so smooth and repeatable. His work is a real cut above.

This Autopilot for Aerial Photography slide show that was done for Barcamp Antwerp looks really interesting.

“The autopilot has a built in mixer. On first use you need to tell the autopilot what the channel and mixer arrangement of your transmitter/airplane combination is. To put the autopilot in calibration mode, switch on the transmitter, put all sticks in the center and switch channel 6 to “ON”. Now turn on the airplane.
At this point you can calibrate the autopilot by putting all sticks in the center and subsequently actuating the aileron stick from full left to full right and back to center, followed by elevator (fullup, then down, then center), rudder (left, right, center) and throttle (zero throttle, max throttle, center). The autopilot will confirm completion of the procedure by turning the rudder full left, then full right and then back to center.”

As promised the contest this week will be a bit harder. Also the previous winners of all outstanding contests including the Happy Holidays 2009 Contest will be determined and posted today. The prize this week is one of those popular micro helicopters. It uses IR from the controller to send control data to the small chopper. It’s sure to provide tons of cat tormenting fun. You don’t need to find the make and model of the item in the picture but you do need to determine what it is used for.

This contest will run for one week (February 6, 2010 - February 12, 2010) . Ending time is based on central standard time. To enter, identify the item pictured above and give an example of what can be done with it.

Please do not give the answer in the comments.

Send an email to contest @ hackedgadgets.com with “Name the Thing Contest” as the subject, and the message body consisting of:

• The name of the item in the above picture
• An example of what the item pictured above can be used for

The winner will be chosen at random from all of the correct entries.

Below are some pictures of the prize.

This Coffee Can Clock is a nice piece of work, there is a good build log and tons of details here at the Wise time with Arduino blog.

“The electronics is based on Wiseduino (Arduino clone with DS1307 real time clock on board), with a LED matrix shield sitting on top. The shield is built with 74HC595 shift registers that drive two bi-color (red, green, and orange by subtraction) 8×8 LED matrices.”

This is an inspirational TEDx video of Dennis Hong of RoMeLa. If you think that you recognize his you are right, he was recently chosen as Popular Science’s “Brilliant 10″ for his robotics.

“Dennis Hong is an expert in the area of novel robot locomotion mechanisms, design and analysis of mechanical systems, kinematics and robot mechanism design, humanoid robots, and autonomous systems. He is the inventor of the three-legged walking robot STriDER. He was awarded the prestigious Faculty Early Career Development award from the National Science Foundation in 2007.“

The Geek Group has acquired a retired KUKA robot. They have made a series of videos about taking it apart to see what makes it tick. Lots of the pieces will be re-purposed into other projects that they have on the go. That is one massive robot, I would have preferred to see it brought back to life but it is also interesting seeing how all the bits and pieces interact. We have seen lots of fun things that can be done with KUKA robot arms, there was the Ice Cream Making Robot, the KUKA DJ Robot, and of course all the fun rides made from robot arms!

If you live in a cold climate freezing pipes is a common concern. A frozen pipe is more than an inconvenience since most pipes are copper and the expanding ice can easily burst the pipe. So even after the pipe is thawed out you have a big job ahead since you now need to repair your plumbing. Viktor from Karosium has come up with a cost effective solution to dealing with the issue. His Microcontroller Temperature Controlled Pipe Heating System turns on an old computer power supply which powers some heat tape only when the pipe needs to be warmed up. Most people who run heat tape will turn it on when it gets cold and let it run all winter, this solution will certainly save lots of electricity.

“I designed a controller from what I had on hand. An old ATX PSU and an ATMega8(overkill). The AtMega is powered by the standby voltage of the PSU (5VSB). PSON is connected to PORTB.0 so the AtMega can switch the ATX PSU ON or OFF depending on temperature. (The PSU turns on when PSON is pulled low). The heating cables are hooked up to a 4pin Molex Connector. The DS1621 was actually a thermostat IC and I was considering using it in a standalone configuration but sadly that can’t be done as the thermostat functionality doesn’t start until a “Start Convert” command is sent to the chip through I2c. That meant a microcontroller was mandatory, so instead of relying on the internal functionality of the chip I just implemented the thermostat function in code. This also meant I only had to run 4 wires from the temp probe instead of 5, and I had 4 wire telephone cable lying around.”

Daniel Eindhoven has designed an interesting new Tesla Coil, this Double Resonance Solid State TeslaCoil has a new coil design which has the capacitor bank integrated into the primary coil.  The new coil configuration has been dubbed the Eindhoven Primary.

“A new composition of the primary coil for a Double Resonance Solid State TeslaCoil (DRSSTC). It is a combination of wire and capacitors. By making the coil like this you get rid of all the parasitic inductions of the capacitor bank, it reduces wire length and saves a lot of space. Calculating the resonance frequency also becomes much easier.”

Chris Savage from Savage Circuits goes over the basics of Rotary Encoder and Shift Registers in the second of his new video series called Savage Circuits TV. You can see all three videos here. If you are wondering why there is lots of Parallax gear used in the videos, that is because Chris works for Parallax.

To read more about Rotary Encoders have a look at the Wikipedia page that also have a good example of Gray Code.

To read more about Shift Registers have a look at the All About Circuits page.

“An incremental rotary encoder, also known as a quadrature encoder or a relative rotary encoder, has two outputs called quadrature outputs. They can be either mechanical or optical. In the optical type there are two gray coded tracks, while the mechanical type has two contacts that are actuated by cams on the rotating shaft. The mechanical type requires debouncing and is typically used as digital potentiometers on equipment including consumer devices. Most modern home and car stereos use mechanical rotary encoders for volume. Due to the fact the mechanical switches require debouncing, the mechanical type are limited in the rotational speeds they can handle. The incremental rotary encoder is the most widely used of all rotary encoders due to its low cost: only two sensors are required.”