Here’s a short guide for converting a Palm III GPS sled into a normal serial GPS receiver. The Palm III is old tech so its accessories can be picked up cheap and modified for other purposes. The GPS receiver needs to be separated from the Palm specific board and a few components need to be transfered between the two. Once that’s done you should have a standard serial GPS receiver. Here’s a cache in case the “Read” link fails.
[thanks nevamore, who has done this hack with success]
a new week! yes, yes yes. thank god. right now i’m taking a hardcore math test that i’m probably bombing, but that’s ok, i have you guys to entertain.
you will be pleased to know i’ve got the stickers designed and done and they’ll be sent out to be made and delivered soon! i’m also working on the 3rd podcast which should be really cool. i’ve got just the right knicks and knacks for it.
so, let’s get down to some links for your monday pleasure and reading.
make your own lightsaber. yeah. you can do it. [XyTec]
i found this to be cool. get free ipod headphones, docks, and more. (you’re hacking the system. fair enough right? plus free stuff.) [mark]
see if you can find it here (it’s still up for me). cnn has a video telling the world about “hackers” and how horrible they are. my view? go to hell cnn.
oh by the way, when you bootleg a movie, do it right.
i’m also picking up my AIBO after my test, I’ll be sure to show him off tomorrow. so after a long hiatus, prepare to see a lot more aibo hacks.
a creative, yet expensive, access point before the linksys WRT was around. [mina]
a russian DJ goes and makes a cassette mixer. pretty wicked. [yauch]
want all the fun of easy to make lazy afternoon hacks? well go here for some fun. [joe]
and by now i think we’ve all heard about how a third-party processing firm had 40 million credit card numbers stolen. yipes.
Development of DSLinux continues to progress. The work of developer Pepsiman has really helped move things along. They’ve got a working Sash shell and framebuffer support. Just yesterday a touchscreen keyboard was added to ease use. It’s still in early development; The shift, alt, and ctrl keys don’t work and the repeat rate is a little quick. I’m sure they’ll get the bugs ironed out soon enough. I look forward to seeing some unique homebrew user interfaces that take full advantage of the dual screens.
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The iTrip is an FM transmitter designed for the iPod. This little hack nestles the transmitter into the PSP case so you can listen to your music through a car stereo. The broadcast frequency is set by playing special audio files, so you don’t need any external adjustments. The transmitter is turned on by plugging in a dummy headphone plug. I’m amazed they were able to cram this into the PSP case.
Building a boost controller is a “slippery slope” sort of mod. Once you complete this you’re just going to want/need to modify something else in the system. A turbo-charger improves the performance of an engine by cramming as much air and fuel into the engine as possible. The engine exhaust drives an impeller in the turbo which drives the compress wheel in the intake path. Engines can’t handle extreme pressures so once the intake pressure reaches a factory set point a “waste-gate” opens to let the exhaust gas bypass the drive impeller so the turbo won’t produce any more boost. Factory boost settings a usually very conservative (otherwise, they’d be doing a lot of repairs) so there is a lot of potential for improvement.
A manual boost controller is placed in the path of the waste-gate’s sensor. The controller bleeds off some of the pressure in the line so that the pressure measured at the waste gate is lower than actual. This tricks the waste gate into staying closed longer than usual so a higher level of boost is reached. They’re really cheap to build, but the most important expense in this project is to getting accurate boost gauge. A little bit of bleed goes a long way and there is no way to tell where you are at without a proper gauge. DSMtuners has quite a few articles on how to build these devices and should work on almost all turbo cars.
ahh, finally back to some good old links. fresh off the grill of course. i’m working on new meeting space for philadelphia, and keep sending other meeting locations in so I can post them!
as for the guy who demands a t-shirt and wants to buy one: they are not for sale. these will be prizes. but maybe we can arrange something with a charity. then i’d see no harm in you paying an outrageous price ;)
breakout on a dot-matrix display sounds pretty good to me. [barbobot]
sigh
This looks like a pretty cool toy to build. At the top of the cylinder is a fan that removes air from the center column of the device creating a low pressure zone. This air is then blown back into the cylinder to feed the rotation. Besides the regular construction supplies you’ll need a squirrel cage fan and speed control. The most expensive part of this project is the mist generator. The nice thing is, you can construct the entire device and make sure it’s functioning before you dump money into the mister. I saw a really large one of these last year at NCAR in Boulder, CO. It was pretty cool, but naturally I was there to see the Cray-1A [via]. Lately we’ve been creating our own path of destruction so we’re hosting the pdf which was originally found at weather-photography.com.
[thanks seesoe]
