Hackaday Links: February 22, 2013

Playstation π

PS3

Yeah, it’s another home made Raspberry Pi case, but [Gabriel]’s Mini Playstation 3.14 is the bee’s knees. The enclosure was once a metal gift box originally intended for gift cards. With a few whacks of a Dremel, the world finally has a new PS3 that runs Linux.

Up there with The Secret Life of Machines

mechatronik

[Mattias] sent in a tip about a really cool TV show airing in Sweden. It’s called Mekatronik, and it’s basically the interesting parts of Mythbusters where [Jamie] and [Adam] build random cool stuff. It’s a Swedish language program, so if anyone would like to make some subs for the episodes, we’ll be more than happy to link to it again.

Web-based software defined radio

sdr

The amateur radio club at University of Twente in the Netherlands came up with something really cool: a web-based software defined radio.  So what, you ask? It’s just streaming audio or something over the Internet? Nope. You can actually control this SDR over the web.

We’re deeply sorry for turning the hardware turn to slag. Really, we are.

Junk box Tesla coil

tesla

[JJ] whipped up a homemade Tesla coil out of junk he had lying around. Basically, it’s a piece of PVC pipe, a tennis ball, and aluminum foil. Even the transformer was pulled from a long-forgotten project. [JJ] is getting some really good arcs, so we’ll call this a win.

Time circuits active

time

[Danilo] was invited to a costume party with a movie theme. He wanted something Back to the Future-is, so he whipped up a flux capacitor (translation). It’s based on a PIC12F675, with the microcontroller running a bit of code that flashes the LEDs just like the movie. Now on to the hoverboard project…

16 thoughts on “Hackaday Links: February 22, 2013

  1. The folks over at Twente really have something there. I’ve used it and am really quite impressed with both their software (which is great for for run-of-the-mill, single range web-sdr’s), but their proprietary hardware with can be tuned to everything between DC and somewhere north of 2 meters. Plus their active antenna array is just great. I’ve used the Twente SDR to pull HFFAX from as far away as South Korea.

    1. Twente is the forerunner of them all (they created the base software). Plus, the Twente SDR is really something special compared to all the single-band radios at the other websdr.org sites.

  2. I’ve been following the work over at Twente for a while. They’ve been operating on and off for several years. It’s interesting reading up on the previous revisions of the board, but there is very little in-depth info that I could find. And no info at all about the current (amazing) board that’s pictured above.

  3. The Secret Life of Machines episodes are available to download in pretty decent quality, except for “The Car”. During digital conversion from analog tape it suffered a bit of field synchronization slippage and about the last third is pretty bad, even on the DVD release, both PAL and NTSC versions.

    The only way to fix it would be to obtain the original film copies and have them re-scanned, going direct to digital instead of from film to analog tape to digital.

    How much would buying the films cost? Around $16,000.

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