A simple game is always much more fun when it is spiced up with some cool electronics. The wooden tilt maze game has been around for a long time. This Marble Maze that is Remote Controlled using an Accelerometer kicks up the original game by allowing the player to interact with the game using a controller that moves the real game according to user movements. Have a look at the project build details for all of the issues that were found during the construction.

Via: Trossen Robotics

"To control the servos I used a BOE development board with a BS2 microcontroller from Parallax along with a Memsic 2125 dual-axis accelerometer as the controller. The addition of the maze transforms this project from a electro-mechanical thing-a-ma-jig to an exciting hands-on game. For this project I choose to build a maze myself using balsa wood. This would allow me complete control of the maze difficulty and dimensions and also ensures the weight is kept to a minimum. I also found wooden balls to serve as the "marbles" for the maze. It just so happens that these balls and the balsa wood walls make a fun "thunk" noise whenever they collide."

How many times were you left frustrated trying to change the channel on the TV just to realize that the batteries are dead. Of course there are no more batteries in the house so you are forced to steal the batteries from a lesser used remote. Even more frustrating is when you need to use the remote that had the batteries robbed out of them. This problem may be a thing of the past, there is finally a remote control that is charged by picking it up and using it! Motion is what charges this cool unit.

Via: OhGizmo

"Sound power generation and NEC Electronics Corporation (President: Kohei Hayamizu, Location: Fujisawa City, Kanagawa Prefecture, following the sound power generation) today announced that power generation in vibration that occurs when you press the button on the remote control with your fingers, "Vibration power generation, "The combination of power control techniques and proprietary technology, a prototype remote control without batteries for consumer electronics."

This video shows how the common pole transformer is made. Overall it is a simple process. If you can get one of these you could also have some dangerous high voltage fun. The video below shows how a transformer works.

Marissa Mayer is the Vice President of Search Product and User Experience at Google. This talk gives you some behind the scenes concepts that have made Google the success power house that it is. She also mentions the famous Google 20% time, this is where you have 20% of your paid Google time to work on a concept that you have. Turns out that 50% of the released Google’s products last year grew out of the 20% time. It is nice to hear her talk openly about how Google can fail also (Google Video). On a side note enrique550 made a laugh compilation of Marissa’s contagious laugh.

Via: Reteno

"Marissa leads the company’s product management efforts on search products – web search, images, news, books, products, maps, Google Earth, Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, Google Health, Google Labs and more. She joined Google in 1999 as Google’s first female engineer and led the user interface and web server teams at that time. Her efforts have included designing and developing Google’s search interface, internationalizing the site to more than 100 languages, defining Google News, Gmail, and Orkut, and launching more than 100 features and products on Google.com. Several patents have been filed on her work in artificial intelligence and interface design. In her spare time, Marissa also organizes Google Movies – outings a few times a year to see the latest blockbusters – for 6,000+ people (employees plus family and friends)."

In College I remember rifling through my now tattered yellow Texas Instruments TTL Reference Book. Texas Instruments has been constantly developing interesting products and is holding an event called eTech Days where they will hold a number of online technical training sessions. It is going to be held tomorrow (November 17th), so have a look at the lineup, register and enjoy some interesting sessions tomorrow. I am looking forward to checking some of them out and hope to see some of you there!

Via: HG Forum

"On November 17th, 2009, please join us to interact with experts from Texas Instruments, TI Developer Network and the open source community, in technical training sessions and in the E2E Community forums. A full schedule can be found below, and see the Getting Started links to the right. Click here to register for the live training and we’ll see you on November 17th.
To participate in ‘Office Hours’ on the E2E community forums, click here to log in, or if you aren’t an E2E Community member yet, sign up for an account."

PyroElectro has built an interesting motor Optical Motor Encoder system that allows a sled to move back and forth using optical feedback to know where the sled is. A L298 DC Motor Controller is used to drive the simple DC motor that is used to precisely position the sled. You may remember this CD-ROM Read Head Actuator Head Scratcher article from earlier in the year where I was wondering how a simple DC motor could be used to precisely position a CD-ROM read write head.

"The goal of this tutorial is to create a way to know where the ’stage’ is, accurate to about 1/4” using optical encoding. The stage is controlled via a 12v motor so we will use an L298 motor controller for controlling the motor via a 18F4520 PIC. The PIC will use hardware PWM generators to output the correct frequency & duty cycle. The PIC will also take the analog input from the IR detector diode to keep track of how far the stage has moved via an internal analog to digital converter (ADC)."

Music selection is usually a boring process. It usually involves some common interface such as scrolling through titles on a portable player, using a remote for your stereo or a mouse on your computer. With this RFID Music Selection called the RFiDJ from Roteno Labs music is represented by tiles and the tiles graphically represent the music that can be expected. I can think of lots of opportunities for developing this much further into a very immersible system. Have a tap sensor so that a tap on the tile will play the next randomly selected song by that artist. I think having this at a party and have a system where guests can add their favorite song to a playlist is also something that would be very interesting!

"The RFiDJ project is my first attempt at an application in Imperceptible Computing. After work I like to listen to music/radio for a bit to unwind. This usually involves logging into my HTPC and selecting a playlist. For this project I attempted to change how I interact with my music and HTPC. Using RFID tags and photo frame coasters I am attempting to simplify the interface to my music."

The prize this week is a loupe magnifier. This contest will run for one week (Nov 14 - 20, 2009) . 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 is a picture of the prize.

It is nice to think that what we have in our head, and take for granted is a fantastic machine. Data centers across the country are using power like it is going out of style however when you put it into perspective that a computer with our brain power would use 10 megawatts of power we still have the data centers beat hands down.

"According to Kwabena Boahen, a computer scientist at Stanford University, a robot with a processor as smart as the human brain would require at least 10 megawatts to operate. That’s the amount of energy produced by a small hydroelectric plant. But a small group of computer scientists may have hit on a new neural supercomputer that could someday emulate the human brain’s low energy requirements of just 20 watts–barely enough to run a dim light bulb."

Morten Bentsen, a 17 year old from Norway made a system that would show him the quality of his internet connection at a glance. If you are into online gaming this could be something useful.

"I recently made an indicator to show the status of my internet connection. It consists of a small VB.net application, which pings a certain site with a set interval (both user-changeable, and sets the DTR-pin of a serial port (port name is changeable) depending on the ping-answer. The DTR-pin goes to a small mosfet, which controls a small telecom relay. The relay is switching 24 volts to the LED-panels this is great for LAN-parties, because the participants can easily see if they are the only one who dont have internet, or if the whole party has lost it. There is one problem though, when I watch videos at youtube, the lights are blinking, because youtube is using all my bandwidth. (yeah I know, my internet connection sucks :D)"