[Nate True] states several times that there isn’t any good use for this project, but his wireless motion sensor is still fun. The transmitter features a passive infrared motion sensor. It sends the output over the 433MHz band to the receiver module. The receiver has a small piezo that plays sounds based on the PIR’s output. His project is featured The Bleeding Edge 006.
[Mac Cody] has continued working on his original optical mouse hack. In the time since we first posted the story, he has repackaged the mouse’s sensor so that it can be used with any robotic platform. He built a custom board for the sensor and modified a lens package so that the sensor plane doesn’t have to be in contact with the ground. His work is based on a NASA paper Insect-inspired Optical-Flow Navigation Sensors. Mac’s sensor seems to be progressing nicely towards his goal of dead reckoning navigation, but he thinks it could do better if the LED illumination was more focused.
It looks like backup copies of games can now be booted on the Xbox 360. Maxconsole has the video. This hack is similar to the final firmware hack of the original Xbox. The response to the challenge code is written directly in the firmware. So instead of checking the disc, the firmware responds to the challenge directly. Here are the technical details. This hack doesn’t allow you to run unsigned code or ignore region codes. All it lets you do is play direct one-to-one copies of game discs.
Related: Xbox 360 Hacks, Xbox Hacks
MP3elf is a network attached MP3 player. It can stream MP3s from your hard drive or connect to internet radio stations. The design is BSD licenced so you can download all of the plans and build it yourself if you want. They’ve got kits available as well. The server portion is written in Java so it should run on your operating system of choice.
[thanks Default]
[Greg Lipscomb] was working on this disposable camera based slave flash when he stumbled into his macro photography project. Slave flashes are used as fill lighting and can be triggered by several different methods. Greg’s project uses a photocell and a microcontroller for trigger and timing. It also makes sure the flash stays charged. He concedes that this design is a bit complicated, but he went with it because he didn’t have any silicon controlled rectifiers available. The microcontroller would be too slow, but his Canon 10D uses a pre-flash before the actual photo, so the slave has a built in delay from that first flash.
The WinXPonMac contest has officially announced “narf2006” and “blanka” as the winners. The solution should be released soon. With this new development the only reason not to run XP on a Mac is that XP sucks… which is a pretty good reason.
[via TUAW]
Super Soda! has been posting a lot of projects, but this is one of my favorites. We covered otherpower’s wind turbine a while ago, but Damon Vander Lind’s turbine features hand-laid fiberglass blades. The core of each blade is hot wire cut out of pink foam by following a wooden airfoil pattern. The fiberglass is laid all at once with five layers at the base and two at the tip. Each layer is slightly offset to handle torque. The entire assembly is mounted to a permanent magnet generator contained inside an alternator case.
[thanks Ryan Bavetta]
