A good soldering station and fume extractor is a must for anyone interested in hacking and modding, but not everyone can afford the expensiveprofessionalmodels on the market. This How-To and the tips within it will guide you through the process of building an inexpensive homebrew fume hood complete with built-in time and temperature controlled soldering station and all the soldering tools you need.
Making a PCB is very simple; it does not consume a lot of time and the results look professional. After reading this How-To and watching the step by step video, you will be able to make your own PCB in your workshop using just a few inexpensive materials.
Many people use protoboard and point-to-point wire everything, but needing multiple copies of the same circuit is the reason that forces many away from using protoboard. After making your first circuit board, you might not point-to-point wire anything again!
I was doing some project window shopping today, and FPGA’s came up on my list. [John Kent] put together a pretty impressive documentation set. He’s written up some of his own projects, some how-to’s and linked plenty of good information for the budding FPGA programmer.
[Ben] finally got part 3 of his XBox 360 laptop how-to finished up. This is the final piece of the series. He spends it covering wiring up the ports, buttons, keyboard and final assembly. There are plenty of shops that handle special order laser cutting – so don’t begin to think that this sort of project is out of your class. If you’ve ever built a model car and can handle a soldering iron, you can definitely build one of these on your own.
I was just checking for this final piece this morning – but props to [Tony] for noticing it first.
Part 2 of Ben Heck’s Wii laptop How-To is up. The first half is all about the little touches, wiring switches, extending connectors, etc. The second half delves into designing the actual unit. Some of the comment’s on Engadget seem to want a full bore step by step build, but fail to realize that he’s really giving them the gold. Very few designers give away their intermediate design steps – But I am reminded of some of the Star Wars movie extras…
[Ben Heckendorn] put together this little beauty on engadget. It’s not quite as over the top as the XBox 360 laptop, but there’s a reason for that. He’ll be putting up a How-To series covering the construction. If you’ve been pondering building a portable yourself, it’ll be a nice jump start for your hardware hacking skill-base.
If you glanced at the PS3 and thought it was too expensive, this might help you justify spending your green. [ken_vs_ryu] put up a mini tutorial on running mythtv under Linux on the PS3 with an external USB capture device. When you consider the cost of a decent machine, video card and blue-ray drive, it’s not a bad deal. (I’m not sure how many Plextor ConvertX encoders you can run at once.) To get things working, you’ll have to thumb through the Gentoo Wiki for the details on setting up the ConvertX.
Part 5 of my DIY HD projector How-To is up over on Engadget. I’m still finishing it up, but I should wrap it up in part 6. I’ll probably make a better reflector mount, but the rest of it is coming along nicely.
