Crave

DIY'er Steve Hoefer used a piezo speaker, a tiny gear reduction motor, an Arduino, and a PVC pipe to make his secret-knock door lock.

(Credit: Steve Hoefer)

I've been hearing more and more about the Arduino microcontroller project lately, and this is by far one of the coolest uses for it I've seen. Arduino is an open-source hardware project meant for easy prototyping of hardware ideas. This is Steve Hoefer's great vision for a mechanism that opens a door when it detects a secret knock. Here it is in action:

As you can see, he's programmed the microcontroller to listen for a specific knock sequence. When it hears it, it turns the deadbolt, meaning you can open the door. It's a simple but genius idea.

We're hoping something like this comes to market. Sure, it's not the most secure idea in the world, but it's fun enough that it'd be great for the inside of homes or backyard sheds or underground sex dungeons.

(Credit: Supermarket)

The music may be horrible, but if you rub a tape head over these ties you can actually hear jumbled sound collages recorded from the NYC metro system. This is possible because the ties are 50 percent audio cassette tape.

If you have $90 to spend on one of the ties, and you are willing to sacrifice an old Walkman for the project, you can make this a fixture of your formal wardrobe. Of course, walking around with a broken Walkman asking every one to rub you with it is not recommended.

This story originally appeared on Gizmodo.

(Credit: Jonathan Worth/PopSci)

I know most of you out there think we landed two Americans on the moon in 1969. Well, let me tell you that you're wrong. It's all a hoax! It was done on a sound stage and George Clooney and Dan Aykroyd were involved!

I mean, look at this real-life version of the Atari classic Lunar Lander vector game!

It took British engineer Iain Sharp less than $800 and a year to build this replica in his garage to honor the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, and it works almost like the real thing. It's powered by a pair of old PCs he wrote custom software for. In addition, the movements are controlled by things like old inkjet printer motors, and fishing line. But what's important is it works just like a real lunar lander would--if one existed.

If Sharp can make a device like this in his garage in his spare time then it's not a leap to assume the U.S. government could have made a full-size mock-up with the years and millions it took to make the so-called "moon shot" happen. This awesome toy might be all the evidence I need. Myth busted.

(Via PopSci)

We know, Francesca, we know...

(Credit: MarthaStewart.com)

It's a dog. It's a porcupine. It's a dog dressed as a porcupine (Martha Stewart's dog Francesca, no less). Yes, it looks like Francesca will be dressing up as another animal species this Halloween, and she no doubt will suffer a serious identity crisis in the process.

The very creative Alison Lewis, editor of the technology life and style blog Switch, went on Martha's show Monday to demonstrate how to make the illuminated porcupine dog costume.

Required materials include fiber optic strands, electrical tape, a 5-millimeter LED light, AAA batteries, silver reflective paper, a craft knife, and a giant doggie toy to give the pooch as a reward for being mocked endlessly by all its canine friends.

On her blog, Lewis also explains how to make a light-up dandelion costume (pictured below) in case you and your pet would rather go the flora route this holiday. Some might call these costumes cute, but we're just worried about Francesca. Poor thing already has her own blog, and now this...

(Credit: Switch)

I thought I was pretty hot when I climbed on a stool and double-sided-taped glowing stars to my ceiling, but their waning green light never captured the night sky like DIY fiber optics.

One home-modder plugged bundles of fiber optics into tiny dremel holes in his ceiling. Using just a touch of glue to hold each star in place, 250 dots twinkle, maybe even brighter than real stars.

Even for a lazy glob of lard such as myself, the install sounds wicked easy thanks to a step-by-step tutorial over at Instructables. That said, I'm still the type of guy to hire out.

This story originally appeared on Gizmodo.

(Credit: Main picture by Photojojo with guest appearance by Microsoft's Clippy)

Besides holding sheets together, the humble paper clip has plenty of other uses. Not only is its slim tip great for poking at small reset inserts on gadgets, we're pretty sure MacGyver can jump-start a car with it. Now, you can add one more use to the paper clip's resume.

Inspired by the paper clip iPhone stand on Lifehacker, the folks at Photojojo have twisted and bent a clip into a contraception that can hold a point-and-shoot. However, given that the bottom of the stand is flat, we're not sure how well it'll support your shooter on uneven surfaces. For that purpose, we think we trust the Gorillapod more.

Nevertheless, if you need to prop up your camera the next time but don't have a tripod, try searching around your desk.

(Source: Crave Asia)

(Credit: Thanko)

The Japanese gadget wizards at Thanko have created a USB soldering iron so you can melt lead on the go.

The USB Soldering Iron can heat up to 390 Fahrenheit if powered through one USB port; with two ports, it gets to 570 F. Wire it to a 9V battery it it will burn at nearly 930 F.

Thanko seems to have a policy of trying to convert every tool known to man to USB, from dental microscopes to electric razors to e-cigarettes. They also have a yen for plain old wacky stuff, like these cat-ear headphones.

They seem to think of everything when it comes to product design. The USB Soldering Iron comes with a handy LED light near the tip to illuminate the work area.

For $28, the iron also comes with a 40-inch USB cable (with two plugs), as well as a 30-inch cable for a 9V battery.

It's clearly not as clumsy or random as a blaster. An elegant weapon for a more civilized age.

(Via CrunchGear)

Ragsdale hooked his camera up to a jeep and drove around West Point at up to 100 kilometers per hour capturing images. He programmed his rig to take one set of images every 20 seconds, and in an hour had 300MB of data.

(Credit: IEEE Spectrum)

Google Wave is getting all the Googley press this week, but let us not forget one of The Goog's other impressive creations: Street View in Google Maps.

As part of a "disruptive technologies" course at West Point, Roy Ragsdale put together his very own Street View camera vehicle, and in an IEEE Spectrum article, he offers a fairly straightforward and cool how-to on doing the same. Why you'd want to is beyond me. Sure, it's cool, but I like to spend my spare time talking to girls.

Street View, of course, affords panoramic views of places on Google Maps so you can get a street-level view of the place you're looking at.

Ragsdale's rig uses a handful of Microsoft NX-6000 LifeCams that he picked up for $25 a pop, and a GlobalSat BU-353 GPS receiver he got for $37, all of which he plugs into a standard Ubuntu-powered laptop to map where he's been. The setup uses open-source software like luvcview from Logitech, so anyone could probably make this happen with a little tweaking. On top of that, all the parts are off-the-shelf. That sounds like it could be simple enough for a great weekend project.

What you do with the images is up to you, though. Google currently isn't accepting home-brewed Street View pictures, though it would be cool if it did. It would allow smaller towns that Google hasn't yet seen fit to Street Viewify to get on the map, as it were. But we're not holding our breath on that.

(Credit: Gizmodo)

The Hack A Day people say hard drive speakers aren't new. Fine. Who cares when they look so cheesetastically retro good as these? I don't.

The gangsta blue horizontal volume unit meter will satisfy your inner pimp too. Too bad it doesn't have some much-needed boombox hump.

This story originally appeared on Gizmodo.