When we posted our first ferrofluid story [frogz] threatened to make a video of his own version. Well he did and here’s the video. He uses laser printer toner and suspends it in lightweight SAE10 motor oil. He says that a thinner oil produces shapes quicker. I don’t think the power drill with the spoon attachment is really necessary though.
[bryan chafy] has been hacking away to get older non VGA displays running on VGA hardware without using a scan converter. You can pick these old grayscales up for cheap or even free. The tricky part is modifying the BIOS to reprogram the VGA card to output a sync and scanrate that is NTSC compliant. He’s managed to do this with a WYSE Winterm thin-client. Another clever trick is the poor man’s triple head display which stores a different image in each portion of the RGB signal.
[ned] received a free X10 RF remote. He popped it open to discover that the device is actually based on a PIC. By replacing the PIC with his own he’s able to issue any X10 command using the remote to any device in the system. He did spend a lot of time with a logic analyzer to try and figure out the protocol, but later found some good reference links. He hopes this will make it easier to connect his PIC projects to the X10 system since this remote doesn’t have to be plugged into the wall like the X10 serial interfaces.
