AA Powered Microcontrollers


[sprite_tm] sent in this nice little single AA battery micro-controller power hack. He’s using the uc to generate a PWM signal for a simple voltage step up circuit – the catch is that the controller has to start working before it can generate the signal. He came up with a nice little solution to this caveat – a push button start that gets things rolling once the coil charges up.

Thanks for the tips guys, keep em comin.

IPhone Eve’ Extra


The guys at I-hacked put up a how-to on giving your windows mobile phone some iPhone skinned powers, but later in the day they decided to make it login required. Thanks to [Katrina] for the tip. (requiring logins for contributed content just doesn’t sit well with me.)

[chris] sent in his own round up of his personal projects.

[Chris Coleman] let me know about hacktherazr. They’ve got some decent guides on customizing just about everything on the things.

[Ben Heck] got sick of emails, so he’s offering to build one more xbox 360 laptop, if you give him a pile of money.

Staring sunday, I’ll be ripping the hell out of my new house (and re-doing most of the upstairs). Do me a favor and keep the tips line brimming over.

[David] has some interesting ideas involving wireless AP antennas and wireless keyboards. How about a cantenna…

Biopong


[Teckjunkie] was inspired by Hack-A-Day to build a bio-interfaced game. He modified a thinkgeek pong kit with an Analog Devices instrumentation amplifier and differential electrodes to create biopong. Flexing either arm actuates the inputs on the pong game. (Now you can just grab some dumbells and get a pong workout.)

Hack-A-Day inspired projects are always welcome to the tips line.

Use A Laptop LCD To Extend Your Desktop Display


I get an email asking for this almost monthly, and [PUNiSH3R]’s take on this covers everything pretty well. He uses some interesting tricks with WINE to get enough performance to play a DVD on the remote display. Yes, the cheapest way is to turn it into a remote desktop display over a network. Personally, I use synergy2 to share my keyboard and mouse, run multiple OS’s and keep my sanity.

Reubens Tube: Fire Sound Visualization


[vbrtrmn] sent in the most fun I’ve seen with fire lately. It’s really just a geeky physics demonstration, but it’s awesome. That’s a foil lined pvc pipe with holes every half inch. Propane is feeding from one side and there’s a 2″ speaker on the opposite end. You can visit the link for the video, or just see it after the break.

Remember: PVC won’t handle that sort of heat for long, and it’ll emit some nasty fumes. In fact, don’t try to make your own unless you can draw the propane molecule without using google.

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