Gearfuse

The Wii Fit was tough to find this holiday season and it seems that it hasn’t gotten any easier to come across. If you’ve got a Wii Balance Board collecting dust because you’d rather not use it to play video games, why not do as the CCCKC do. Jestin Stoffel and Vince Thompson used an Arduino microcontroller and two servos to operate a labyrinth game.

Not David Bowie’s Labyrinth, either. I’m speaking of the box with a maze on top with holes which you guide a steel marble through. Yeah, this Wii Balance Board controls it. A great alternative use of the device since, well, people got tired of Wii Fit.

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This is a perfect HOW TO for those of you teaching in a classroom or working on multiple projects at home. It was made by a father and son duo who threw the directions up on Instructables. It only costs around $65 to make, including the glass. DIYers and project managers alike simply cannot pass this up.

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Here’s a sweet Sonic The Hedgehog $50 chess set that’s due out in Germany next year. It features Sonic, Tails, Amy, Knuckles, A Chaos Emerald and uses rings as pawns. The board itself resembles the Green Hill Zone stage from the first Sonic game. It’s due out in March and while I’m tempted to get one, something tells me that the final product won’t look as good as this 3-D rendering. At least not for fifty bucks.

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Straight Up Chess makes gaming and chess boards. Nothing new there, aside from the fact that these games are designed to be played on a vertical surface. Mount the board to your wall and casually play a game with your roommate. You have to take a piss, you make a move. Cooking dinner, make a move. Grabbing a condom from the sofa cushion, make a move. It’s quite elementary, my friends.

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The next time your son begs you for a fingerboard skate park, try not to laugh in his face. Instead, be more considerate. Perhaps his new hobby will eventually lead to him going pro and becoming sponsored and thus earning him a living doing what he loves.

Of course, you don’t want to settle for the cheap plastic junk Tech Deck sells, so Peter Thomsen of Instructables demonstrates step-by-step how to make a concrete fingerboard skate park. Your kid will be the talk of the town. That is, if he possesses the strength to carry this thing around with him.

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Here’s an easy way to turn an Ikea dresser into an ulta-violet oven used for exposing printed circuit boards. Blogger Aris gutted the drawers and mounted the top with an array of 35 ultra-violet LEDs that are powered by an HP printer transformer with a 1A/37V output. That’s a heck of a lot of power. What resulted were some nice looking circuit boards you can see after the jump:

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The Duemilanove (meaning “2009″ in Italian) is the latest addition to the Arduino line of microcontrollers. It looks like it’s predecessor, the Diecimila, and also shares similar specs with one main subtle difference: the Diecimila has a jumper which is used to select a power source (USB or external power) while the Duemilanove automatically selects the appropriate power supply , eliminating the need for the power selection jumper.

Other than that, you’re still getting all the luxuries you would from a Diecimila out of the Dueomilanove. Now, thanks to the removal of the power selection jumper, you’ll no longer have to worry about blocking the jumper after installing an Xport shield.

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I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time. The Basement Scientist, a fine DIYer and hardware hacker, has finally received his MIDI shield boards from Batch PCB. What does this mean? It means that soon, he’ll do a run of MIDI shield PCBs that will be available for purchase. In turn, that means you can easily run MIDI through your Arduino, making it fun and easy to create your own instruments.

I received my two MIDI Shield circuit boards from Batch PCB over the weekend. I’m happy to report that they came out 100% error free. However, I think I’m going to make one or two minor tweaks before getting a bunch produced.

MIDI requires the use of the Arduino serial port pins, which are also used by the on-board USB programmer. With my current design the MIDI Shield has to be unplugged before the Arduino can be programmed, which is a pain in the ass. Instead, I’m going to add a jumper to the MIDI Shield. Remove the jumper, program the Arduino, then put the jumper back on. Much better than pulling the whole shield off every time you need to upload code.

I’m incredibly excited to get my hands on one of these shields. I was contemplating on building my own but TMS has done a fine job and I wholeheartedly support it.

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When you can’t afford a real breadboard for prototyping, you might as well turn to the next best thing: a piece of toast. Yes. This gentlemen embedded a circuit of LEDs inside a slice of bread and the end result is simply delicious.

The difference between shoving your circuit inside a piece of bread and this project is that the slice of bread actually acts as a circuit board with etchings and all. Unconvinced? Hit the jump:
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Digi-Key has unleashed its power house single-board computer called the Beagle Board. This developer dream board is perfect for DIY projects and ground level design work. Don’t judge it by its size either, its processor: the ARM Cortex A8, runs up to 600MHz while delivering over 1,200 MIPS (million instructions per second). It packs quite a punch for a 3″ x 3″ board.

It connects to your computer via mini-A to standard-A adapter with a high speed USB 2.0 port and even supports 1280×1024 DVI-D video output. Listen, I could go on and on about the heat this baby’s packing, but it’d be best to get one for yourself and try it out. Maybe you’ve got what it takes to make a game on it, or even better: a robot. It’s relatively cheap, too. At $149, its the least expensive, most powerful development board on the market that I’ve heard of.

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