Hackaday Links

There was an Engadget post today about Motorola IMFrees that are free after rebate. From the IMFree hacking forum it appears that the project is still in pre-alpha.

Hack-A-Day isn’t hiring. Weblogs, Inc. is. They’re hiring for a new geek blog: “old skool geek as in comic book/sci-fi/D&D genre geeks”.

MAKE:Blog featured the Travel Tinker Trouble Kit that a lot of sites picked up. Julian has added a couple followup posts since then: one, two. I think a good companion to this would be the Altoids survival kit. [The Mark]

[Robogeek] continues to work on his LED bed design improvements.

[combustible] and his buddy Ken built this vodka filtering rig using four filter stages. The system is pressurized to 120psi. It took about 30 minutes to filter a 1.75 of vodka, but that was because the chilled vodka froze the latent water in the filters.

[JaSon] said that security took away their office’s “unapproved appliances” i.e. microwaves, toasters, etc. He’s looking for some rack mount projects that make these items look more official. Probably something a little more discrete than the 3U wine rack [jesse] found.

[Paul Stamatiou] has posted “Part 3: Azureus Anonymity” or “How to abuse the Tor network” DO NOT DO THIS Read the comments for suggestions that don’t involve hoarding bandwidth used to protect peoples lives.

[laughing man] didn’t like the low volume of his PSP headphones so he removed the resistors.

For those who hate traveling outside you could build a Surroundings Defense System. [Jon]

[Ian Nott] made an iPod video foldy to help people cope while waiting for delivery.

This is how I roll Darn this t-shirt addiction [via Waxy] UPDATE: I just saw BoingBoing’s post about someone hooking up their PS2 controller to an oscillating fan to complete the 10^6 rose level on Katamari. Go look at the screen shots so you don’t have to do it yourself.

The tip line

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Roomba Rover

roomba rover

[heathkit] and a friend built this rover a couple years ago. They picked up a first generation Roomba because it had all of the features they were looking for: a good bump sensor, low profile, wheel encoders. Before removing the brains of the vacuum they put it in debug mode and figured out the control pinout. After wiring in a PIC they had rudimentary control of the device. For some higher level processing power they attached a Virgin Webplayer (defunct internet appliance). The Webplayer has a mini-pci slot so they added a WiFi card. Now they can transmit video and SSH into the device for full control.

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Floppy Drive RC Car

floppy

Most people don’t use their floppy drive anymore so you might as well make a car out of it, right? If you short two sets of pins in the drive connector, the motor will spin freely when 5V is applied. This motor is used to drive the rear axle. The front wheel is steered using the read/write head’s stepper motor. An NE555 timer is used to pulse the motor when the steering buttons are pushed. This design is really simple and has a tethered control, but it is a good starting point if you want to try something else.

[thanks Boff]

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USB And UDP Using An AVR

usb ir

If you understand that alphabet soup title you’re in for a treat. Igor Cesko’s original project was constructing an IR interface for his computer so he could control it remotely. He built a simple serial dongle for this task because he didn’t want to use a microcontroller for decoding the IR. USB is becoming far more common than serial interfaces so Igor decided to try programming a microcontroller for USB communication. His controller works for his IR project, but it should be easy to use for any other project you want a USB interface on. His most recent project was teaching an AVR to do UDP. Using his IR -> UDP device and a crossover cable he can place the receiver farther away from the computer. It requires a full duplex connection and has been tested connected directly to a NIC. It’s unknown whether it will function properly connected to a router.

[thanks johannes]

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X10 Signal Analyzer

x10

[hb] was having some serious issues with noise in the power line communication of his X10 home automation system. He decided to switch to an all RF module system eliminating the need for power line communication. While trying to improve his reliability he built a data logger. It is constructed out of a LEGO RCX and an X10 universal module. Once the RCX is set to listen it records every time that the module activates. A script is used to tell the universal module to trip at regular intervals. Missing time steps in the RCX’s log relate to missed commands. If you’re interested in home automation you should check our previous story and its comments.

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