This little rover gets around on rough terrain pretty well. [Dean Segovis] built it using parts from a Roomba. The Roomba uses wheels in conjunction with gearboxes that handle a lot of the dirty work in getting this prototype going. [Dean] grabbed four of them, as well as the motor controller board and batter, and installed them on this Rocker-bogie suspension. In the video after the break he mentions that this would be quite a good climber if the batter were relocated to the center of the body. An ultrasonic sensor adds obstacle avoidance with and Arduino taking care of the processing. We can’t wait to see future versions of the Roomba’s rough-and-tumble outdoor cousin.
[Daniel] wrote in to show us the project his group has been working on. It is a massive display wall consisting of 28 projectors and 30 computers. With a resolution of 7168×3072, viewing a 13.3 gigapixel image is a treat. That treat is made even stronger by the fact that navigating the image is done multitouch style with a touchless system built from web cams. We’ve seen lots of projects come out of the NUI group with similar interfaces, but none that used the webcams like this. Usually, the webcam is detecting some kind of interaction between the person and an infra red light source. Maybe that is happening here and we just don’t see it.
[Viktor], one of our favorite avid hackers, has been playing around with 1-wire systems all this month. What started out as a MicroLAN Fonera has turned into an iButton interface, to a 1-wire powered hub, and finally a 1-wire character driven LCD. Anyone looking at 1-wire systems or OWFS could surely benefit from his testing.
Are you still using heat sinks and fans to cool your computer? Lame. Tearing up your property to bury geothermal coils is definitely the way to go. [Romir] has been working on this for about a month and is just getting back data from the first multi-day tests. Take some time to dig through his original post. It includes something of a table-of-contents for the 35 updates he’s posted so far. Closed loop cooling seems to be trendy right now, we just didn’t expect to see a system this large as part of a personal project. The last one we looked at used just six meters of pipe.
[Matthias Hullin], the creator of the snega2usb let us know that its name has been changed to the Retrode. We watched this device go through the development cycle and learn to read SNES and Sega Genesis cartridges via a USB connection. Now it’s seeing some hacking to extend those capabilities. [Jon] managed to rig the Retrode up to read Virtual Boy cartridges. The Virtual Boy was a Nintendo console from the mid ’90s that used two different screens in a glasses format to produce a 3D gaming experience. Now that the cartridges can be easily dumped you have a chance to replay the titles using an emulator.
[Rbz] fixed his friend’s Red Ring of Death stricken Xbox 360 by improving the GPU cooling. Because an overheating GPU is a common cause of the failure, he first tried to replace the thermal compound for better heat conductivity between the chip and the heat sink. This helped a bit but within two hours the problem was back. Troubled by the heat discoloration on the bottom of the DVD drive, he removed it and screwed a cooling fan to the GPU heat sink. That did the trick, so he moved the drive to the outside of the case with the aid of a longer SATA cable. It’s not pretty, but it worked.
[Garrett Birkel's] weekly ride usually features some pretty wild costumes. He wanted something to step up his own look so he make this LED mohawk bike helmet. He had an LED strip to start with and found a way to use acrylic and clear plastic tubing to fold the lights into the appropriate shape. From there he designed a PCB for some DC-DC converters to provide regulated power. The juice comes from Lithium Iron-Phosphate cells, the same kind we saw in the electric bike assist battery a few days ago. We find it a bit wild that you can pick out the PWM of the LEDs in the lens effect of that photograph.
[Sparky] notified us of his hack to allow interaction with the core of an Aldi GO Cruise 4300 GPS Windows CE OS. All that’s required is a few programs and registry edits to the GPS, which anyone can accomplish within a few minutes. But we suggest you go slow and double-check your work; nobody wants a bricked system. After you’re done you can run such great programs like the one [Sparky] suggest for 4WD enthusiasts, Ozi Explorer.
