Are you human? Resistor edition

[PT] tipped us off about a new way to screen bots from automatically leaving comments. Resisty is like CAPTCHA but it requires you to decipher color bands on a resistor instead of mangled text. This won’t do much for the cause of digitizing books, but if you can never remember your color codes this is a good way to Read the rest

Flaming hot brick plays games, promotes tendonitis

The continuing battle for smallest console-made-portable continues with this N64 portable hack. Unlike the last two that we saw, this version opts for an over-under rather than side-by-side control scheme. This results in a small overall size, but because this thing is a thick brick we wonder if playing for hours would just leave you horribly mangled and crippled … Read the rest

Replicating connectors by machining PVC

[Alex] bought a hang on tank filter for his aquarium. Unfortunately it was made for a different water level than he was using and didn’t have the ability to adjust that he needed. Add to that the non-standard pipe sizing which compounded the problem by making it difficult to extend the intake and output tubes. He overcame this by machining Read the rest

All-terrain camera

One part remote control car, one part camera, and two parts flash make up this all-terrain camera. The folks at Burrard-Lucas photography put together this guerrilla device to capture images of some of the world’s more dangerous wildlife like elephants and tigers (oh my!). This project furthers our opinion that great photographers need to be great hackers to get … Read the rest

Infrared transmission decoding

Alright class, quiet down and open your books to the chapter on Manchester Encoding. [Brian J Hoskins] did just that when building this RC5 decoder. This protocol is commonly used in television remote controls. You use them on a daily basis, don’t you think it’s time you understood what’s going on? Check out his writeup and learn the dark … Read the rest

Egg incubation chamber

[Mazomen] left the expensive ready-to-order options for others and built his own egg incubation chamber. It keeps the eggs warm and happy in a Styrofoam lined box. Temperature regulation is handled by an ATtiny26 microcontroller in conjunction with a DS18B20 temperature sensor. When the temp drops, two 60-watt light bulbs in the chamber above the eggs are turned on … Read the rest