[Jared] sent in his experiment in building his own heated vest for motorcycle riding. He used some of the ever so common enamel coated wire and some surplus teflon tape in place of Teflon coated wire. So far he's been testing things out with a bench power supply, but it seems to be working. Despite my love of building my own stuff, I'd probably just pony up for a commercial product. His site is … [Read more...]
PCB milling hell sunday extra
March 30, 2008 By 18 Comments
I've spent about 18 of the last 24 hours working on milling a PC board for my upcoming how-to. So far I've murdered several copper clad boards, built a hold down table, redesigned the board in eagle at least five times and snapped off a $15 half round engraving bit.If you're wondering, my new board milling table is a piece of MDF that I laser etched a .25" grid onto, then added some aluminum … [Read more...]
In-cable guitar preamp
March 29, 2008 By 25 Comments
[Bryan] sent in this old but excellent guitar cable hack. [J. Donald Tillman] managed to fit a fet based pre-amp inside the 1/4" connector of a guitar cable. It's phantom powered - so it'll leach power from the sound board/mixer. I'm just impressed that he fit the thing inside there.On a side note, This is the kind of crap that gives hackers a bad name. I hope the jerks behind it end up as Soylent … [Read more...]
Reverse engineering the Novint Falcon
March 28, 2008 By 5 Comments
[qDot]'s been spending alot of time with the Novint Falcon haptic controller. He's put together a 'brain dump' of everything he know about the device - and some notes on his efforts to put together his own software library for the thing. I'm definitely interested in the parallel robotics platform that it appears to be based on. … [Read more...]
Nixie tube VU meter
March 27, 2008 By 15 Comments
[Daniel] sent in his Nixie tube VU meter. It uses 14 Russian IN-13 Nixie bar-graph tubes. He built a custom circuit to amplify, filter, smooth and feed a voltage divider to assign signal levels to segments and finally some high voltage transistors to drive the tubes. The circuit looks pretty big, but it's repeated for each tube - so he worked hard to keep the cost down as much as possible. Now … [Read more...]
Cat-5 Ethernet/Serial/PoE to your wireless router
March 26, 2008 By 29 Comments
Adding PoE(Power over Ethernet) just wasn't good enough for [steve]. Not only does he have power running over his Cat-5, he shared the ground wire and used the remaining pair to add a serial console to his rooftop mounted wireless router. Nice. … [Read more...]
Wiimote headtracking FPS laser gaming
March 25, 2008 By 12 Comments
Remember [John]'s Halloween laser tracking game? He's been busy since then. After building his own version of multi-player missile command based on his laser interaction game, he added head tracking (using the same method as [Johnny Lee] . Check out the video after the break, and grab the full source for Mac or Linux. … [Read more...]
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