Oil Computer Ver. 2

oil bath computer

Reader Jay was so mesmerized by the original oil computer story that he had to try it out himself. He had other good reasons: producing an experience report in English and creating a case that didn’t look slap-dash. It turned out to be a partial success and definitely a lesson. First thing he discovered was how not to oil proof a hard drive. He does get the chance to use the phrase “rock out with my caulk out”; which only goes to show: if you mess with bad puns, you will get burned. The rig did drop the computer temp quite a bit and Jay’s got numbers to prove it. Within hours of completion the case developed a fatal crack and redistributed the oil to the floor. Better luck next time Jay. It has been a couple months since the first story so if you’ve completed a similar project feel free to post your pics and/or comments.

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Hackaday Links

Links

what a great day out! so great that today’s links are gonna be hardcore. super fast, super awesome, and super rockin. because you should be outside playing football. with me.

netflix be rockin some secret memos….oooh la la.
a real good waste of a tablet pc so it can be a photo frame. [sam]
a guy from japan goes and makes a jetpack from pressurized soda bottles. a must see. [aaron]
the burning scooter. beyond awesome….but it’s hosted via dyndyns. so get it while it’s hot (omg hahaahaha a pun! i’m so funny!) [trilly]
more guitar goodness! i’m in heaven! keep sending in links like these guys! [eric]

and of course it’s how-tuesday over at engadget. read my how-to on building your own cheapie pedal board! now you can totally pretend to rock.

and to you people who “got longhorn beta months ago”…you didn’t. you got an early build of it. the official beta was released a few days ago. :)

the bbc also launched an open source website. i highly reccomend checking it out of course.

NYTimes wrote up a story on the death penalty for hackers (among other punishments of course too). load of crap, read it using bugmenot.

holy smokes. phrack (yes the phrack) is coming out with a final issue. this to me is pretty big news!

lastly, go forth and control thy house with thy psp! [charlie]

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Homebrew Wind Turbine

wind turbine

otherpower.com has a great write up on building and flying this 17 foot monster. The turbine features 25 pounds of magnets in the rotors and 16 pounds of copper wire in the stator. It’s a really interesting process going from bearing assembly, to coil mock-up, resin casting the rotors and stator, blade assembly and finally raising the tower. The result is a turbine that can stand up to winds over 60 mph and has been known to produce 3.8kW. It’s a good project and also fun to read because of all of the warnings about not severing your fingers with high powered magnets.

[thanks John Heylin]

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CD Printer

cd printer

There aren’t many people that want to spend money on a printer whose sole purpose is to print directly on a CD. I’m sure there are quite a few out there that have an extra inkjet printer laying around looking for something to do. Why not chop it up into a dedicated label printer? This tutorial shows how to modify an Epson 640 printer, but it should work on any printer with the same style feed. So, if you’ve got one, try and decipher the heavily watermarked images and have a go.

[thanks com]

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Hackaday Links

Links

it’s a gorgeous sunday here. probably because we don’t have hurricane dennis bearing down upon us in philadelphia. so while it’s still nice out, lemme throw some links on the grill for you guys to chew up.

the “no parts” pic programmer. [n00bmaster]
the IDE64 project. pretty interesting, a great concept. [patrik]
torrone goes to town with wolfgang puck’s self-heating can. [alex]
make a hot-air pencil for de-soldering chips. [hcker2000]
real life tron via GPS. i don’t know why i never though of this before.

babblefish it if you need to, but these german guys turn miniture “hot wheels” cars into working R/C cars. amazing craftsmanship. i’d love to try one out! [janff]

this is beyond ghetto i don’t even wanna look at it.

but he makes up for it with these sweet longhorn screenshots. [weirdguy0101]

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MegaSquirt EFI

megasquirt

The MegaSquirt electronic fuel injection system has a completely open design to allow for easy construction and tweaking.  The project has been around for quite a while and has a well established user community with many success stories. The open design means you can construct a unique fuel injection system; You can combine high performance parts with OEM parts from various manufacturers because the device has been designed from the ground up to be flexible. The MegaSquirt is well documented and you’ll be fully aware of what you are getting yourself into before you take the plunge.

For some more auto fun check out the latest Packet Sniffers episode.

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Hackaday Links

Links

the podcast link is fixed. download it here.

it’s the weekend. woohoo. rock eh? we’re trying to get jolt cola to sponsor our philadelphia hackaday meeting and it looks good. it’ll be held at the holiday inn here on august 4th. more information will come later, no worries. so here’s some links to hold you over while you glee with excitement.

the xshox mod. make your xbox controller shock you! (read carefully) [camzmac]
this pez hack is pretty interesting to say the least. [bm5k]
get your “free” verizon get it now on. [robby]
portable cardboard speakers. they’re a bit um