Numerous quiz buttons built on the cheap

[Sprite_TM] was tapped to build a rather large quiz buzzer system. Judging from his past work we’re not surprised that he seemed to have no trouble fulfilling the request. As the system is not likely to be used again (or rarely if it is) he found a way to finish the project that was both quick and inexpensive.

Each … Read the rest

Cat5 camera flash extension

extension

Network engineer [Mario Giambanco] recently purchased a cable to move his flash off camera. Unfortunately, it ended up way too short for his purposes. Instead of purchasing a slightly longer proprietary cable, he decided to employ what he had around him: a lot of cat5e cable and ethernet jacks. He cut the cable close to the center in case things … Read the rest

Composite video through cat5

cat5_composite

[mixadj] needed to run some video cable from one part of his house to another. He was lacking the proper amount of video cable, but had a bunch of cat5 laying around. so he built a converter to run his composite signal through the cat5. He states that he wouldn’t run it more than 70 feet without amplifying the … Read the rest

Passive network tap

Making a passive network tap can be an easy and inexpensive undertaking as shown in this Instructable. Passive monitoring or port mirroring is needed because most networks use switches which isolate the network traffic and this does not allow for the entire network to be monitored.  This example uses a single tap, using multiple taps will provide access to … Read the rest

Cat-5 Ethernet/Serial/PoE to your wireless router


Adding PoE(Power over Ethernet) just wasn’t good enough for [steve]. Not only does he have power running over his Cat-5, he shared the ground wire and used the remaining pair to add a serial console to his rooftop mounted wireless router. Nice.… Read the rest

Wake on lan network tester


[Jachin] sent in his network port tester built from a network card, wake on lan cable and a battery holder. Three AAs supply 4.5v DC just like the motherboard would to the card via the WOL cable. Nice trick, I’d consider adding a static bag at the least to keep the card from getting zapped.… Read the rest