Month: November 2006

Homemade Cathode Ray Tubes

November 20, 2006 by 5 Comments


[dylan] tipped us to [Nyle Steiner] who’s been making his own cathode ray tubes Not satisified with that, he made an even smaller one[youtube] and he built an oscilloscope[youtube].

Once I noticed that he’s an amateur radio operator, I started digging around his site. His propane lawnmower is a great idea, his diy photocell makes me think of mr. wizard. If you dig tube amps, you’ll definitely be interested in his vaccum tube building experiments.

[Got a cool circuit? Lay it out on a PCB and enter the Design Challenge.]

Screen Saver Power Switching

November 19, 2006 by 6 Comments


This is another power control hack along the lines of the serial controlled power outlet. Instead of only managing a printer, [Brent] uses the IO lines of the parallel port to drive some SSRs in order to turn off all of his peripheral devices – think lamps, speakers, scanners, etc. He posted the whole thing over on instructables.

[Want to show off your skills? Send us a tip with your latest – or enter the Hackaday design challenge. I should have some more prizes to announce later this week. I’m just waiting for them to arrive.]

Paintball Minigun

November 17, 2006 by 25 Comments


Every so I often I Google “paintball minigun“. This time it actually turned up something good. Special effects builder Rick Galinson has been working on a… wait for it… paintball minigun (cache). There is a video of a dry fire run on his site. He’s apparently having trouble with the triggers; I just want to know how he plans on loading it.

Rick has a lot of other cool projects. He’s got a cool two arm minigun prop (cache) (looks like Monev the Gale), A remote controlled submarine (cache), and a really cool telemetry suit (cache) for collecting upper body movement data.

For completeness’ sake you can check out Monty’s Miniguns for information on other paintball miniguns and miniguns in general.

Mp3 Flash Recovery

November 16, 2006 by 10 Comments


[Bart] sent in his efforts to recover the flash data on a mysterious mp3 player he found laying about. He successfully built an interface using a AVR/ATmega setup to get access to the data. This could be a viable way to recover data from broken thumbdrives – but it’s probably easier to swap the flash chip onto another drive. The Chipquik stuff sounds interesting – cold SMD chip desoldering. Given the cost, I’m not sure just how cost effective it is compared to buying a rework station.

[If you haven’t already, check out the Hackaday Design Challenge Fabienne’s nano is one prize and I’ll be announcing more prizes as soon as I’ve got them in hand.]

Design Challenge Mini-extra

November 15, 2006 by 14 Comments

Check out our new contest – design a business card PC board.

[Windell] sent in his tv-b-gone retro mod. [I want one that changes all the TVs to the SciFi channel.] He points out the ultra tv-b-gone as well.

[pillowcase] sent in his iTunes shower button – skip songs mid shampoo.

We heard about making a portable high power laser from a DVD burner laser yesterday, but the bandwidth was exceeded before we got there. It’s back up, for now.

[Mitch] let us know that a few days ago+ we appeared on TV in a lock bumping ad on Channel 6 WOWT News in Nebraska. Anyone else seen this?

Don’t forget that this site is driven by tips, so keep us in mind when you whip out the soldering iron.