Month: February 2006

AccelR8, A Homemade G-meter

February 8, 2006 by 11 Comments

g-meter

Jesper has created an automotive performance meter using a handful of ICs. The key chip is the ADXL202 from Analog Devices. It measures acceleration while the AVR 8515 keeps track of time and does all of the calculations. All you need to do is enter the weight of the vehicle and the meter will calculate your 0-60 mph time, 60-0 braking distance, and maximum horsepower. There is a complete schematic on Jesper’s site, but the code still needs to have a few bugs worked out. This project is essentially a reproduction of the first generation G-TECH/Pro meter (bunnie has a picture of the original board). The new generation G-TECH meters are fun to play with and do interesting things like determining the engine RPM by measuring the noise in the electrical system.

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3D Board Modeling With Eagle And POVRay

February 7, 2006 by 15 Comments

eagle 3d

Sometimes the two-dimensional layout of a circuit board doesn’t tell the whole story so Matthias Wei?r created Eagle3D. Once the board is laid out in EAGLE you export it using the Eagle3D tool. The tool has predefined parts that it then uses to render the board in 3D using POV-Ray, a free ray-tracing program. There are a lot of parts included already, but you can define more using POV-Ray’s Scene Description Language. Using POV-Ray you can also make 3D movies your board

Air Cooled Mouse Pad

February 7, 2006 by 13 Comments

air cooled mouse pad

Jared and Dan from Inventgeek have just posted their latest how-to: The air cooled mouse pad. They know that there are air cooled mice that you can buy, but why should you have to use an inferior mouse for gaming just for one feature? They decided instead to convert an Antec laptop cooler into the ultimate gaming mouse pad; One that keeps your hand cool and lets you use whatever mouse you prefer.

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The Mac Minitosh

February 6, 2006 by 15 Comments

minitosh

Hack-A-Day reader [Lee Olivares] stuffed a Macintosh Plus full of new hardware without butchering the case. From the original test fit he could see that the Mac Mini’s DVD slot lined up well with the original floppy slot, so it just needed to be widened a little bit for clearance. The monitor is black and white, but a separate VGA port has been split off for an external monitor. The original motherboard was cut down so that the original power switch and ports could be used. Any new ports were hidden behind the battery cover.

[thanks Lee and Adam]

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FON Or How To Get A Cheap Linksys WRT54G

February 6, 2006 by 34 Comments

fon

FON hit the news recently because it acquired some venture capital from Google and Skype. Its goal is to create a global network of access points run by home users. The users can either offer access for free or resell their bandwidth. The actual FON software is based on DD-WRT, a Linux based firmware for the Linksys WRT54G wireless router and others. DD-WRT features a captive portal, QoS, and many additional features. FON is selling 3,000 routers with their software pre-installed for 25USD/EUR plus shipping. This is a great way to pick up a WRT without paying Linksys’s Linux penalty and it comes with a great firmware already installed. Oh, unless you have broadband from a friendly company like Speakeasy, becoming a fonero is probably a violation of your “terms of service”.

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BackTrack Live CD

February 5, 2006 by 30 Comments

backtrack

First Whoppix and Auditor then Whax and now finally everything has come together to form remote-exploit’s latest Live CD project BackTrack. The very first beta of the new system was released today. I downloaded it and tested it on my 600m. It had a nice uncluttered feeling right from the beginning by not offering the scads of boot options found in Knoppix. The system came up really quick and stopped at the command prompt instead of going to a GUI which is another nice touch. The CD also doesn’t automatically bring up the network interfaces since you may have something special in mind. The default windowing environment is KDE, but Fluxbox is included if you’re on a diet. Kismet started up and set up my Intel 2200 card without any assistance. I really think the team has put together a great product and I look forward to future releases. Try it out for yourself.

[thanks steve]

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POV Pendant

February 4, 2006 by 11 Comments

pov

Reader [Franz Gabel] purchased a POV kit from ladyada and started modifying it for his own application. He assembled the POV without a PCB so it could fit inside a small metal pipe and attached a leather lanyard. He’s still in the early stages of the project. It is fully assembled, but he’s working on additions like a docking station to recharge and download new messages. He’s also developed a Flash based system for generating new .c files based on text input. Here is his forum post about his project (Coral CDN, so ladyada doesn’t break my arm).

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