[Blake] sent me this one when my house was covered in ice. He put together a charger for his new iPod nano er, shuffle. It’s sort of in two parts: a USB to mini-jack and a 5v wall adapter to USB port.
Month: January 2007
Going Snowboarding Extra
I’m heading west to do some snowboarding, so I thought I’d clean out the stuff I’ve been saving for you guys.
[Nagi Punyamurthula] sent his notes on making PCBs. It’s a nice introduction if you’re new to it.
[Monster] sent in his how to on making a solder mask
He suggests using mcmaster-carr p/n 9709K61 (4 mil) or 9709K55 (3 mil) copper sheet.
[monster] and [uchobby] sent in using a scanner to take measurements on a PCB
[MoneyOx] sent in a DIY Wii sensor bar
[Tom] sent in Water cooling via swimming pool. This made slashdot, but worth a look if you missed it.
Meta is another DIY segway, similar to [Trevor Blackwells]. (I’ve actually ridden that one) Thanks [Peter]
[Zack] sent along details on using a Nintendo DS for VoIP.
[Bruce] sent in his shuffle in a hockey helmet hack. I like the pseudo-dock he created for it.
This was on engadget a while back, but we’ve been getting lots of tips. Check out the iPod in a gameboy mod.
Finally, [everyone on the planet] sent in this Xbox 360 tilt controller hack.
Thanks to everyone for their tips!
WiiBot – Armed And Pointy
[Brian] sent in his Wiimote hacking project – he and his cohort used it to control an industrial sized robot arm. Then they armed it. Keep in mind that the sword is full size. [Aaron] ended up writing a basic pattern recognition program to get it to perform they way they wanted. Response time is a bit laggy, but not bad for a one-off project. I need my own industrial robot.
Nike IPod Hacking
Someone else’s apathy often becomes someones motivation. The guys at Gordian Labs got sick of trying to use Nike’s website so they dug into their iPods to find the data generated by the iPod+Nike running shoe add on. Then they put together a handy site for processing the data from the iPod. The site also accepts GPX data, so you can combine it with GPS data to track your runs and your routes. After they showed it to me, I prodded them and they put together a short How-To on getting the data under Mac, Windows and Linux.
Wii Laptop How-To (Part 1)
Part one of Ben’s Wii Laptop How-To series is up. Ben spends it discussing gutting the Wii, starting up his CAD process for designing the enclosure and makes the thing even smaller than it was before. Because the Wii is so small to begin with, I think alot of people assumed that he just slapped it into a case and added the display.
Concrete Cast Speakers
[Markus] sent in his 5.1 concrete speaker project. Each speaker is cast from a single piece of concrete. The inner cavity is created using the dear old lost-wax technique. The writeup is in german, but the process is pretty clear.
Magnetic Strip Resistor MIDI Controller
[Joel] sent me a tip where I discovered this fun hack. It reminds me of the old pencil lead resistor trick. It looks like Ableton Live has been inspiring quite a few original controllers.
From the post: (Myspace doesn’t seem to have individual post linking)
“If you REALLY want to do this, the code is here. It is sloppily written in PASM for the Ubicom SX microcontroller running at 50Mhz addressing an ADC0808 (datasheet) 8 bit parallel ADC, because it’s the year 1993.”
