Month: November 2005

Electrified Tankbag

November 20, 2005 by 21 Comments

tankbag

Once Scot got his second motorcycle it became very apparent that he needed to figure out a way to transfer his gadget gear between bikes. A simple trailer connector is used to provide 12V to the bag. This power is distributed by a block with three switches on it. One powers the map light. Another powers the radar detector. The third switch is for a future MP3 player. With some cable shortening Scot was able to get the radar detector and its display into the bag. Now by simply disconnecting the power lead he can move the whole bag to a different bike.

[thanks Sleekblack]

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Hacking An LCD

November 19, 2005 by 28 Comments

lcd

The HD4478 is an extremely common LCD controller. The folks at Sorgonet got this particular display out of an old credit card reader. It’s easy to talk to these controllers using just a parallel port cable. With the lcdmod project you can send text strings directly to the display from the command line. Sorgonet has a lot of related LCD links if you are interested in putting a display on your next project.

[thanks h-tech]

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Winamp Control With Serial Interface

November 18, 2005 by 20 Comments

winamp

Pasteler0 wanted to build an external control system for Winamp. Using the COM-port plugin he was able to wire up 4 control buttons directly to his serial port. The software also supports a 15 button mode. The switches are mounted in a clear plastic floppy disk box and connected to the computer serial port using CAT5. It’s a nice hardwired solution for control, but if you want just a simple remote, try WinLIRC.

[thanks geuis and ian]

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Crystal Radio Built From Modern Junk

November 16, 2005 by 18 Comments

crystal radio

[h. p. friedrichs] (AC7ZL) has some great plans for building a crystal radio. The stator coil and output coil are wrapped around the outside of a CDR sleeve. The tuning capacitor is constructed by sandwich two clear CDs between metal and attaching this inside the top of the sleeve. The rotor shaft is mounted using the bushings from a pair of disassembled potentiometers. A hot needle is used to tap the stator coil through the housing every fifth turn. Even though the parts aren’t very traditional it looks like a really solid radio. He’s got instructions for building a matching ear piece out of tea tins too.

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Build A Google Maps Service

November 15, 2005 by 17 Comments

google map

[8Ball] was interested in building a Google Maps based service, but didn’t know where to start. Luckily he stumbled across Peter Rukavina’s Charlottetown Transit Map. The project shows the bus routes and has schedule popups linked to each of the stops. Peter was nice enough to include full source code for how this was implemented in PHP and Javascript. He also describes setting up the necessary MySQL tables.

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