The first contest is over and the big winner is Kevin. The winners will be notified via email shortly. Here are the answers:

1. Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)
2. Tribble from Star Trek
3. SOS
4. Rotary tool
5. Rancor from the Return of the Jedi
6. The cover from the first printing of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot.
7. Colecovision
8. “Don’t Panic”
9. The Legend of Zelda, Street Fighter, Tomb Raider
10. Motoko Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell
11. The Fifth Element
12. Atari 2600 (4 button version if you want to get extra technical)
13. HAL 9000

The Rundfunker Team made this really nice looking WiFi Radio. The system is powered by a VIA Epia Mini-ITX board. They chose the M10000E LVDS which has built in LCD support and an onboard CF card reader, which holds the customized Knoppix. The finish quality on this is excellent and there are a lot of pictures in the attached photo album. Also note the link to the Wiki is bad. The correct link for the Wiki.

I bought a little trinket because it had some nostalgic value and then started using it as a test of my co-workers. It made me start thinking of some more visual tests and finally came up with my Visual Geek Test.

Sends your answers to contest_1@onlyhacks.com by the end of 10/31/08 and win one of the prizes below. I will award prizes based on the number of correct answers. If there is tie, the winner will be chosen at random from the correct entries. Only one entry per person, please!

First Prize - One LED flashlight and the item shown in question 1
Second Prize - One LED flashlight
Third Prize - The item shown in question 1

Jason had been working on a quad-rotor flying thing project for a while. His was evaluating the Parallax Propeller chip got the quad-rotor moving in high gear. He used a 3-axis accelerometer, a dual-axis gyro and a 12-bit ADC. He glued it all together with a Kalman filter and some PIDs.  Mix gently and let simmer for a month or so, and voila!

Dan wanted to monitor the power usage for his house. He installed some current sensors made from a couple of TV flyback transformer cores. The voltage is stepped down by another circuit. Then both the voltage and current are amplified to the correct levels and the ATmega168 microcontroller computes the power consumped using the formula P=V*I. A graphic LCD shows the power usage and can also display the voltage and current waveforms. All logs are then saved to an SD card. <via MCU Project Everyday>