Solar powered ice maker

solar powered ice maker
Producing ice without electricity just got a lot easier thanks to these engineering students from San Jose State University. Their system uses solar heat to facilitate evaporation of a coolant. When the sun goes down and the coolant turns back to liquid, its temperature drops drastically due to extreme pressure differences. The unit can produce 14 pounds of ice per … Read the rest

Comcast announces 250GB bandwidth cap


Today, Comcast updated their Acceptable Use Policy to cover exactly what they feel is “excessive use”. When the Comcast cap starts October 1st, they will contact people breaking the 250GB per month transfer limit and ask them to curb their usage. While it’ll be hard for most people to hit this limit, we still wonder if policing 0.1% of the … Read the rest

Pac-Man portable


This is another fine project to come out of the benheck forums. [sam_thornley] built this portable game system last Fall. It uses the guts of a JAKKS Namco TV arcade stick. The composite signal from the board is connected to a 2.5″ Intec screen with a CCFL backlight. Four rechargable AA batteries are in the case for 2.5 hours … Read the rest

16 circuit bent toys

OObject compiled a list of 16 circuit bent kids’ toys found on YouTube. There’s a broad range here: from Speak & Spells, to Pikachus, to Game Boys, and even the odd vinyl based toy. It’s an interesting list, but you won’t find a single soothing sound in the group.

[via Gizmodo]… Read the rest

GP3X to be released in October


You should be able to get your hands on your Wiz as soon as October. The Wiz, also known as the GP3X is the highly anticipated follow up to the GP2X, a handheld game system that runs linux. Sporting a 533 MHz ARM processor, 64 MB of RAM, a 2.8 inch OLED display, 5 hour battery life, and 16 … Read the rest

Macro photography with an iPhone


The camera lens on the iPhone is much like any other cameraphone lens in the fact that the lens has a fixed minimum and maximum focus length. If you want to get a little closer to your subject, you just might want to give [eastrain's] macro camera mod a try.

According to [eastrain] both first and second generation iPhone cameras … Read the rest

Aurora mixer now available


It’s been a long time coming but that highly sought after open source mixer, the aurora224 is now available for purchase on the company’s website. The aurora mixer is a fully programmable USB mixer complete with 24 back lit knobs, 2 faders, and a single crossfader.

While the instructions on how to assemble your own mixer from scratch have been … Read the rest