Cheap Compound Microscope

microscope

[Aj] found this great article for building a really cheap microscope. The goal of the project is to construct a compound microscope that is superior to the cheap toy/children’s microscopes. Besides standard construction materials it uses the lenses from four disposable cameras. The article also covers a lot of possible improvements to the ‘scope: focus control, fine focus control, condensers, different eyepieces.

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High Altitude Linux Take 2

high altitude

[jcoxon] was inspired by the original Linux weather balloon project. His Pegasus 1 reached an altitude of 66,585ft and took over 600 pictures. The flight logging system is based on the Gumstix waysmall computer system. It captures data from the GPS receiver and controls two cameras. There are photos from both a downward facing camera and a side facing camera. Periodically the last three GPS entries are sent to Jame’s cellphone via SMS; this made recovering the payload a lot easier. There is already a second baloon planned.

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Mini Gas Turbine Motorcycle

minibike

Russ W. Moore of Bad Brothers Racing has an awesome project on his hands. The motorcycle frame is from a Yamaha YSR-50. Smaller than a standard street bike and larger than a pocket bike it comes with a 50cc engine and is street legal. The gas turbine is being constructed from a Cummins ST-50 usually found in large trucks. The documentation is pretty thorough and covers the build from the beginning. It’s still in progress, the exhaust and pumps still need to be mounted, possibly a starter too. The ECU will be a Basic Stamp II. See, you don’t need to be Jay Leno or have 150K to have your own jet bike.

[thanks arocketman]

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Hackaday Links

Yeah, I know Engadget is F@H now. I doesn’t bother me since we’re already sitting at #175 and are top 20 producers. If you need help troubleshooting your setup check out the unofficial Team Hack-A-Day Folding@HOME forum. [pocketlnt]

Speaking of Engadget: Did you see the low tech tea serving automata? You can build one entirely out of paper. [Manion]

Linux kernel 2.6.14 release impacts nearly every architecture. Lots of cool stuff has been merged like Centrino support and FUSE filesystem (think GmailFS). I’d be all over this, but still no Reiser4.

I hope someone gives [Peter] a proper rotary tool as a present. Maybe his future projects won’t look as gnarly as his CD player iPod disguise.

Modifying a Dell PowerEdge SC420 to accept a 16X PCI-E video card [h-tech]

[dcgrendel] wrote some dhtml to generate VMware .vmx config files.

Xbox-scene has some info on Xbox 360 security measures. [SilverX]

SnakeOil Labs has a couple how-tos up. Setting up FreeNX on Ubuntu and using Firefox with SwitchProxy.

[Alex Harris] has written up his experience installing Linux on his 2G iPod mini.

Live Knoppix CD for running a PPC and x86 distributed compiler (distcc) [Corey]

[John Bokma]’s experience making an XP Pro VM for the VMware player

[sle118] has an autoassociate script for WRT client mode.

Have a good weekend and we can always use good tips.

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Thursday Nano Hacks: Getting Power From Your Nano

nanoframe
For this week’s Nano Hack we will cover how to get power off your iPod Nano’s battery. Power can be useful when you need to run other small low power devices in conjunction with the Nano. These devices can be small circuits, lights, etc. In next week’s installment we will use the power we draw to power a glowing sleeve for the iPod Nano.

What you will need:
– an iPod connector cable to cannibalize (we used a Dock Connector to USB 2.0 + FireWire)
– a multimeter
– a soldering iron
– some sort of thin knife or miniature flat head screwdriver to pry open the connector

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