There are very few constants in the world of home-made electronics. things that you might have found on the bench of a mid-1960s engineer working with germanium PNP transistors just as much as you might find on the bench of one in 2017 working on 32-bit microcontrollers. one of these constants is the humble Altoids tin. The ubiquitous mint container is as helpful a size for the transistor circuits of previous decades as it is for the highly integrated circuits of today, and has become something of a conventional form factor.

One thing you might not expect in an Altoids tin though is a vacuum tube, even one protruding through the lid. [opeRaptor] though has done just that, though, with a very nicely carried out design for a NIXIE clock in your favorite mint container. We’re writing this up as a Hackaday prize entry so at this stage in the competition the boards are still in design for the prototype, but the tough power supply to make 180 V DC from a single cell is already proven to work, as it the clock circuitry. The final clock will be a very compact device given the size of the tin, and will consist of an ESP8266 board for wireless network connectivity.

For a project at this early stage, there is frustratingly little real work to go on aside from some renders, but there is at least a video showing the PSU working driving a NIXIE, which we’ve put below the break.

Surprisingly this isn’t the first Altoids tin clock we’ve brought you, there was this much a lot more pocketable binary example.

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In middle of all the adding features that must have been available day-one, Apple announced something really interesting for the hardware hacking community. The new iphone 3.0 OS will support application communication over bluetooth or through the dock connector using conventional or custom-made protocols. From Engadget’s coverage:

10:19AM “They talk over the dock, and wirelessly over Bluetooth. things like playing and pausing music, getting artwork — or you can build your own custom-made protocols.”
10:19AM “Now here’s a class that we think will be really interesting — medical devices.” Scott’s showing off a blood pressure reader that interfaces with the iphone — wild.
10:18AM “Here’s an example — an FM transmitter. With 3.0, the dev can build a custom-made app that pairs up with it, and automatically finds the ideal station and tunes it in.”
10:18AM “With 3.0, we’re going to enable accessory developers to build custom-made apps that talk directly to that hardware.”

No solid connection specification has been published yet. We’re ecstatic about the prospect of developing our own accessory hardware, but we wonder what sort of hoops you’ll have to jump through. Apple doesn’t have the best track record when it pertains to approvals. just this week they denied MSA Remote client app store entry; it’s a multitouch client that uses the conventional TUIO protocol. Prepare for similar roadblocks in the future.

[via adafruit]

[Andy] wrote in to show us how he hacked his Pleo to be controlled by a Wii Nunchuck. He has installed Xbee units for the communication as well as written a “skit” that allows the Pleo to just stand there and wait for commands. He is using an Arduino to interpret the Nunchuck input and send it to the Pleo. It’s a pretty amazing proof of concept, but the response time is pretty slow. This might be due to the Arduino’s slower serial communication rate.  Yes, we said you might want to refrain from hacking them, due to their impending extinction, but did you expect us to stick to that? If you’re going to dig into one, you may also be interested in how to hack the Pleo for face recognition and remote control.

This grid of letters is a puzzle game for tablet devices called Ruzzle. The contraption attached is an automated solver which uses LEGO Mindstorm parts to input the solutions on the screen. [Alberto Sarullo] is the mastermind behind the project. As you can seen in his demo video after the break he has a flair for the cinematic. but he makes you work a little bit to discover the details of his project.

His post gives a general overview of how this works. A Linux box takes a screenshot of the Ruzzle board. After processing the graphics with Imagemagick he uses Tesseract — an Optical character recognition program — to figure out which letter is on each square of the playing area. From there NodeJS is used to discover all possible words with the help of a dictionary file. The final solutions are pushed to the LEGO parts to be traced out on the touch screen with a stylus. The nice thing is that he published all of his code, so you can drill much deeper into the project by pawing through his repository.

[yergacheffe] was able to get his hands on a shiny new Google ADK board about a week before it was revealed at I/O, as well as got hectic putting together a neat job to show off a few of the ADK’s features. His concept was to meld together the ADK as well as Google’s new music service, two products he states complement each other extremely well.

He had a handful of LED matrices left over from last year’s maker Faire, which he made a decision to utilize as a Google music metadata display. The base of the screen is made of laser-cut acrylic, with a few spare ShiftBrites illumination up the Google music beta logo.

He states it took actually just a couple lines of code to get his Android handset to talk with the screen – a testament to just exactly how simple it is to utilize the ADK.

Pretty much any individual can walk up, connect their phone, as well as see their present music track on the screen with zero fuss, which you can see in the video demo below.

While doing severe fruitcake research, (no, really) we stumbled across the excellent Fruitcake toss held every January in Colorado. The specific entry above caught our eye. Omega 380 was developed by a group of Boeing engineers as well as currently holds the distance record of 1,420feet. It’s a big compressed air cannon. All pressure is human produced utilizing an exercise bike turning a pump. obviously the team’s very first contest entry was a traditional surgical tubing slingshot. It ultimately broke down during a extremely chilly year, so they changed to this newer design. You can see a lot more videos on the operation Fruitcake blog.

[Lee O’Donnell] is showing off his version of a MIDI organ pedal hack. We’ve been seeing a few of these lately. The organ pedals are a great stating point as they’re easy to patch into electronically, and are created to take a beating from your feet and come out the other side no worse for wear. The build goes beyond one of our favorite MIDI pedal conversions in both features and finish.

An Arduino Nano pulls this project together. It scans the pedals regularly and converts the crucial presses into MIDI signals. but the design includes this amazing looking front-end which [Lee] first prototyped in cardboard before cutting and bending his own Aluminum tread plate. A two-row character display supplies a menu system, but the buttons themselves act as feedback based on the behavior of the light inside each of them. One example of this is shown early in the demo video after the break. the blue button toggles between polyphonic and monophonic mode with the light fading in and out for the latter.