We’ve seen a lot of 3d printing lately, with the RepRap and Cupcake, both the fused deposition modeling type. We don’t often see the Inkjet method. This is a great example of one, built in someones home. Instead of laying down layers of molten plastic, he uses the inkjet system to deposit glue like substances into layers of plaster. This project is much higher resolution than the other two, as you can see in the video of it making an RC engine case below. He is currently rebuilding it to be even better and larger.
Last month we speculated on the recent rise in Xbox 360 E74 errors. We assumed that this was because of an increase in the number of HDMI consoles and that the associated scalar chip was failing. Unfortunately since these weren’t red ring failures, they didn’t fall into the extended three year warranty period for Xbox 360s. That is until this week when Microsoft admitted that some E74 errors are the same types of failures that cause the RRoD and would repair E74 under the same three year warranty. Kotaku attempted to get a better explanation out of Microsoft, but only got a little more info. Microsoft did confirm that E74 is not a reclassing of RRoD, but that there is some overlap between the two.
As you’ve undoubtedly seen on every other website in the universe, the verdict is in. The four defendants from the Pirate Bay have been found guilty of copyright infringement and sentenced to 1 year in prison and some pretty large fines. This could be a pretty important case since it deals with the blurry area between supplying material and supplying a means to get material. Though the verdict is obviously bad for the individuals, the site seems to be thriving from the media exposure. They’ve stated that the site will stay up. We’ve been watching this since it began, and now we’re curious what this means for the rest of the file sharing world.
[Aaron] a google employee came up with an idea that would be good for the environment, as well as fun. The Radish is a solar powered display, updated from a google calendar, with extremely low power consumption. They are building this to be an indicator of the conference room schedule. When we first read this, we wondered just how much greener it could possibly be than printing a few sheets of paper. Then we read that they were going through six reams per day. wow. The Radish gets its power through a solar panel, and preserves it through some creative power saving modes and the fact that it has an LCD that only requires power to update. Would this be a good place for some E paper? Data is transferred using IEEE 802.15.4, which is slow, but also more efficient in terms of power than normal WiFi. The system is so efficient, it can run for 3-4 days in low light conditions after a charge . Another cool fact is that [Aaron] got to design and build this on company time. Google allows people to spend 20% of their time on innovative new projects of their choice.
correction: the LCD goes into an extremely low power “sleep mode” when not being updated, and retains the last image loaded.
[Ozan] sent in this build log from when he made a Wiitar. As you can probably guess from the title, it’s a guitar combined with a wiimote. He has completely gutted the Wiimote and installed the internals in the guitar. Some toggle switches were mounted to control the button states on the Wiimote. This is a pretty useful setup as you can use the Wiimote data to control effects on the guitar. We’ve actually seen a very similar setup before. [Ozan] has included the build log, as well as a simple glovepie script and a sample effect patch.
The Bent festival, which begins tonight in New York City, is a celebration of DIY musical instruments. Artists from all over converge to beep, blip, and strum for your pleasure. With a heavy emphasis on hacking your own instruments, this is definitely something we’re interested in. If you’ve only heard a little bit of circuit bending and didn’t like it, you may want to give it a try anyway. The musical genres are extremely diverse, it’s not all just random noise.
When [linux-works] found himself needing a switch that could convert coax to opto, he made one. The main chip is a cd4052 cmos analog switch, which he says is really cheap. The rest is pretty self explanatory. This setup can switch between 4 different inputs as well as do the coax to opto conversion.
