Acimods contributor [Blizzrad] has just finished one of the cleanest mods we’ve seen in a while. With minimal modification to the outside of the PSP he was able to add an external PS2 controller. This naturally took a lot of internal modification. The controller and PSP use a 25 pin SMT connector salvaged from a laptop. The controller’s connector housing is from a set of component cables. Video after the break plus some wiring pictures.
Month: May 2008
XY Fabric Interface
[Maurin Donneaud], the giant fabric keyboard builder, has also been working on the XYinteraction tactile interface. XYinteraction is made of two sheets of fabric stretched across a square frame with the conductive threads of each sheet running in opposite directions. When the user touches one of the sheets, it makes contact with the other sheet, relaying x-y coordinates to a computer via a LilyPad Arduino. More details after the break.
LED Ambient Light Strips
[Shadow] sent in his ambient LED strip project. He picked up a ton of RGB (Red/Green/Blue) LEDs off of eBay and built several LED strips. To get up and running, he used an LED-wiz controller. With the off the shelf controller, this is a pretty easy project, and the ambient lighting effect looks great. Check out the video after the break or on the project page.
In 2006, we posted about [rafkep]’s similar ambient lighting project.
Best Of The Rest
Here are some more stories from yesterday that we found interesting:
- MediaDefender takes down Revision3. Revision3 posts about it; takes down self.
- Monkey cyborg
- Multiplayer iPod Touch Pong [via Waxy]
- Powered exosuit available for preorder, 200 pound capacity
- Atari Punk Capsule [via BoingBoing]
- That CSS history leak keeps getting pitched as a feature [via Download Squad]
- Turbografx-16 emulator for iPhone
- Video of cyborg Luke arm from All Things D shows a 3 armed engineer; we’d like one too.
- Comcast gets defaced by meddling kids.
- BBtv goes to a wearable technology fashion show.
- ASUS Eee Box teardown [via Engadget]
See an interesting project? Please send us your tips!
Solar Powered Lawnmower
Our post about what it takes to convert your home to solar power probably put you in a green mood, but if you want to start with something smaller, check out this guide on how to add a solar panel to your lawnmower.
You will need a battery-powered lawnmower for this, as well as a 12-volt solar charger with a car lighter jack. This easy hack mainly involves a small amount of work with the wiring; the car lighter jack must be removed from the solar panel so that the wires can be attached to the batteries. Yeah, that’s it. We’d love to see a more elegant solution since the way it is now you have switch the wiring from parallel to series everytime you want to mow.
For a more complete lawnmower hack, check out this remote control lawnmower.
How-To: Super Simple Serial Terminal
This hack shows how to make a dumb terminal out of a keyboard, LCD screen, and an 8-bit microcontroller. From time to time, a portable dumb terminal can be handy for when you have to rescue a headless server that’s acting up or if you are building a minicomputer out of a WRT, or if you just want to learn how to run a keyboard and LCD screen with a microcontroller. This super simple serial terminal will use RS-232 to control a headless linux system. Additionally, you might want to check into some of the command line interface programs that allow web browsing, AIM and IRC chatting and more directly from the terminal, but nothing beats being able to track your pizzas with this device.
The Linux system in question here will be Linux Mint. It’s a young distro based on Ubuntu that’s gaining a lot of attention lately, though the principles can be used for other Linux distros.
What It Takes To Go Solar
ExtremeTech has posted an article detailing the process of adding solar power to a house. The author included some interesting detail about his personal power consumption, and details about the process of selecting his contractor too. The total cost of the installation came to about $36,000 after state and federal rebates for going solar.
It’s not a homebrew setup, but it’s good to see an article detailing all that is involved. We’ll take you through the tech side of it after the break.
