[Alan] from Hacked Gadgets put this Bawls automatic light together pretty quickly. He used a photocell, transistor, LED, and a 9V battery to make it turn on automatically when the lights go out. It creates a nice eerie blue glow. You might remember that he isn’t the first Hack-A-Day reader to get lured in by the Bawls lamp. [Chris] made a cold cathode Bawls lamp last fall. I found this picture on ZapWizard’s photostream as well.
I love waking up and finding a great project from a reader like this ergonomic mouse (cache). As you can see from the picture, the centerpiece is the massive scroll wheel made from a VCR head. He credits jpaturzo for the idea. The inertia of the wheel gives a lot better sense of how fast you are progressing through a document than methods like auto-scroll. The mouse is assumed to be more ergonomic because it keeps the bones in your forearm in line. The hand rest on the mouse is formed from Shapelock.
[Jared Bouck] has posted the latest project at Inventgeek: Thermaltake minifridge. Jared isn’t a big fan of the cost/reliability trade-off that comes with most overclocking projects so he decided to take on an entirely different cooling project. He found this Thermaltake case that resembled a refrigerator and took it the rest of the way. The cooling components came out of two 65W peltier camping coolers. After gutting the case, he mounted the power supply so that the intake and exhaust are external to the case. The peltier coolers were wired directly to the PS and the entire case was lined with foam. The last step was to add plexiglass ramps for the cans.
Unhappy with commercial fan controllers Jos van Eijndhoven decided to build his own. The circuit supports three LM60 temperature sensors with pots to adjust the turn on temp. A PIC 16F676 microcontroller reads the temps and controls three groups of fans. A potentiometer is also supplied to control the minimum fan speed. To prevent oscillation the fan speed is reduced slowly in response to temperature drop.
[thanks Alan]
I was stumbling through HeadWize‘s project archive the other day when I came across Steve Connor’s Poor Man’s Surround Headphones. He used a pair of Sony MDR-CD60 for the base and added three pairs of ear buds. One pair is used for the front channel and two for the rears. The rears have their own amp with the bass turned up to increase the separation. He used a Sound Blaster Live! card for the source. If you are interested in amplifiers and other sound projects, you should definitely have a look at HeadWize.
With version 5 of the WRT54G, Linksys decided to dump Linux and start using VxWorks. This made buying a WRT a gamble if you wanted one with Linux. DD-WRT recently released a micro version that supports version 5. You’ll need a JTAG cable to install it since very little is known about VxWorks bootloader. Even with this new firmware it’s hard to ignore that the router is underpowered and you’d be better off with something else.
[via Digg]
I’m sure most people that have built a CarPC are already familiar with shutdown controllers, but I think this hack is pretty clever. Computers don’t like being turned off suddenly so you need to figure out how to power down the PC safely. This circuit has a serial connector and appears to XP as a generic UPS. When the ignition is turned off it breaks the 5V line to COM pin 8. XP responds by hibernating. Once the computer shuts down the relay for the power inverter opens. When the ignition is switched on the inverter powers up and the computer turns on.
[thanks SilverPill]
