[Phillip] published this great step by step tutorial on making a remote shutter release from a wireless doorbell. The pictures are great and the process is fairly simple. There is only one additional chip requred and a little bit of soldering. This is a great way to get some remote shots for cheap.
[via Lifehacker]
[Benjamin] submitted this slick project. It’s a gesture based control unit for the ipod and iphone. It plugs into the dock port and allows you to control the track and volume with simple gestures. While accellerometer equipped units can already “shake to shuffle”, they lack the ability to simply skip tracks forward or backward. He notes that with an accellerometer, simple gestures can be harder to decipher than with a gyro. The gyro gives the ability to tell which direction you are twisting it, so it’s easier to utilize. [Benjamin] was previously covered when he released the iPodGPS.
Ars Technica writes about three new toys coming out this year: a sub 100$ projector, tv game, and night vision goggles. The projector runs at standard TV resolution, takes standard composite in, and outputs an okay picture. The night vision goggles are monocular but focus both eyes on a single RGB LCD. The goggles uses an array of IR LEDs instead of amplifying ambient light to see in the dark. Lastly, they have a standalone implementation of the arcade game Big Game Hunters. The rifle uses a sensor bar to do the motion tracking and features a 32MB rom to hold the game files.
[Tim Williams] made his own induction furnace. A copper tubing coil forms the primary winding, as the material to be heated becomes the short circuited secondary. The load material is subject to high power magnetic fields operating at radio frequency. The rapidly changing field induces current flow within the material, creating a great deal of heat. The brute power required a cooling system to match. In the video below, the induction furnace can be seen melting common table salt.
Reader [Bradley] sent in his ArduiNIX project, an Arduino shield designed for driving nixie tubes. The shield allows the Arduino to drive and multiplex nixie tubes without any additional hardware. These antique-looking displays are commonly hacked into clocks. It takes 9 volts from a wall wart and steps it up to over 200V in order to drive the displays. The shield is capable of multiplexing up to 80 individual elements. He has example code for driving a 6-digit display and a clock on his site. He is selling kits and completed shields too.
Related: Victorian nixie tube clock
[thanks Bradley!]
Our friends over [adafruit] recently released the Sensor Pack 900, a collection of parts for anyone who is interested in using analog sensors with their projects. The pack includes 9 sensors. They range from simple thermistors and hall effect sensors to sharp distance sensors. Also included in the pack are 3 unidentified components that can be used to interface with the analog sensors in the pack. At only $30, the Sensor Pack 900 seems to offer a great set of introductory components for anyone prototyping a new device.
in the oomlout offices, everyone loves twitter. They love it so very much, they decided to find new and fun ways to participate. This one is the TwypeWriter. It searches for a keyword and then physically types out the results for everyone to peruse. There are a couple videos of it in action on their site, as well as the source code to make one for your self.
[via the Hack a Day flickr pool]
[Chris-Koopa] sent in this sweet little throwback to the good ol days of Atari 2600. He had been playing his old unit, lamenting the poor visual quality on his new TV when he had an idea. He picked up an Atari flashback2 and began modding. He added a cartridge slot and made some case modifications to make it look more like the 2600. The final result is that he can switch between the built in games, or play strait off of the cartridges with crisp clean video. There are other methods of doing this, like modding the Atari itself or building a whole new console, but this is pretty sweet too.
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