Month: March 2005

Homebrew Helicopter Flight Sim Controls

March 20, 2005 by 6 Comments

heli controls

whirlyman sent us a link to instructions for turning a usb flight stick into a realistic helicopter flight control system for use with your favorite flight sim.

steve, the project’s creator, did something really interesting here because his control system externally manipulates the stock ms flightstick.  the stick wasn’t disassembled or altered to connect the realistic controls for the pedals, cyclic and collective.

update: ugh — geocities bandwidth limit exceeded.  for those of you who just want to take a quick look, i’ve added a couple pictures and a link to google’s cache after the break.  let me know if a better mirror exists and i’ll post it.

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Wave Vessel: Audio Visualization

March 19, 2005 by 29 Comments

wave vessel

this is really fantastic.  christiana yambo over at censtron wanted to show us how to make a wave vessel — a television-turned-audio oscilloscope machine.

their documentation shows you how to take an old television set and hook it up to your stereo for audio/visual effects the likes of which most people only see in winamp.  a switch on the side of the tv allows you to choose between two visualization modes.

you can see a video of the wave vessel in operation on their site, complete with a ‘you spin me round’ dead or alive soundtrack.  my opinion: pete burns looks much better on the wave vessel.

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Bicycle Wheel Pov

March 18, 2005 by 27 Comments

bike pov

here is a slick hack involving a bicycle wheel and a persistence of vision toy.

one thing that’s really cool about this one is there is a second led row that blinks out bitmaps backwards on one side of the wheel.  this lets you print out text messages and have them be readable from both sides.  it appears to work really well — i’m thinking that the author is probably not a republican

Unix Motorcycle

March 17, 2005 by 15 Comments

unix motorcylce

some of you are probably rubbing your eyes, but you read it correctly. unix on a motorcycle.

a fellow by the name of ben installed a freebsd powered pc into his kawasaki z1000.  a webcam on his helmet connects to a video capture board in the pc, which he uses to record movies of trips to the burrito store.  his future plans are to have the freebsd box control his ipod, track gps data, and potentially interconnect with the bike’s ecu.

a kick ass case mod, a unix media center, and a cool extension of the car pc theme.  if i could last more than 10 seconds on a motorcycle in the best video game ever without ejecting over a parked car, i might consider trying this out myself.  until then, i think i’ll stick to walking.

thanks for the link, xfred.

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Art Hack: Giant Rubick’s Cube

March 16, 2005 by 16 Comments

giant rubick's cube

since we are on the topic of rubick’s cube hacks, i would probably be derelict in my duties if i didn’t mention the manhattan sculpture that a crew of hackers briefly transformed into 512-cubic-feet of rubick’s goodness.

this one definately ranks right up there with the mit media lab srubbing bubbles.  art hacks are so incredible.  they have a subversive way of giving regular folks a brief look at life through hacker goggles.

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Lego Rubick’s Cube Robot

March 15, 2005 by 15 Comments

lego rubick's cube solver

correct me if i’m wrong, but technology was supposed to make our lives easier, take care of us, make us dinner, raise our children, and, fulfill our every dream.

so what has technology done for you lately?  nothing?  well, my friend, today we have a hack that will change your life forever.  today sammo sent us a link to jp brown’s amazing rubick’s cube solving robot.

the final task on my big list of things to do can finally be crossed off.  life is good.

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Make An Infrared Webcam

March 14, 2005 by 80 Comments

IR webcam hack

First off — don’t go getting all Silence of the lambs on us, aight? But if you’ve got some legitimate, non-creepy reason you want to record video in infrared, Geoff Johnson’s gonna show you how to do it. He’s gutting a fairly generic USB camera made by Sweex, and is careful to note which steps are Sweex-specific and which are not. You should be able to get this working with any ol’ USB cam you’ve got lying around with possible slight modifications.