Scott was tired of throwing money away on cans of compressed air (who pays for air?). He decided to build a compressed air can that could be recharged. The aerosaol can that he used should be able to handle at least 200psi. The travel DC air compressor is only good for 50psi so he doesn’t expect this to turn into a frag grenade anytime soon. It’s not nearly as powerful, but at least now it’s “as free as the air you breathe”.
Here’s a pretty rough project for cutting records out of acrylic. It uses a standard turntable for the base. The carving head is a chisel shaped needle attached to a small speaker. Speaker movement is translated into needle vibrations. The head is hand cranked across the surface of the record. The final addition to the system is a vacuum hose to remove the acrylic threads. I wish they would have spent more time taking pictures of this thing than making flash animations.
[thanks vennox]
U-Verse is AT&T’s fiber IPTV service. No matter how many set top boxes you have in your household AT&T limits the number of DVRs to just one. So, what hardcore countermeasure did they employ to lock down their users? They unplugged the hard drive! No. Really. You don’t even have to look at this article by Hack-A-Day reader [Chad Brantly]; just unscrew the the cover, plug the drive in, and you’re done.
I always enjoy hackers who build items that have been mass produced for years. Take Charles Altmann’s DIY Turntable. Audiophiles would have to pay an arm and a leg to get something this unique. The base and platter are made from stacks of plywood. The spindle is a Harley-Davidson Shovelhead intake valve and guide. The motor drive is actually a stepper motor. Precision speed control is provided by computer generated sine waves. His homebuilt tonearm was what got him interested in building the entire table.
[thanks bp]
Want your home automation system to know the exact position of your garage door not just whether it is open or closed? Then the ultimate garage door monitor is for you. There has got to be at least one person that needs that, right? Well for the rest of you it is a handy guide for how-to implement analog sensors (like this potentiometer) into your home automation by way of an analog to digital converter.
[thanks ledtester]
Two clever students at MIT have built this impressive brute force safe cracker. Their target: a document safe with a S&G 8400 lock. The 8400 is a group 1 manipulation proof lock. Group 1 locks will resist manipulation by an expert for at least 20 hours. These guys used a stepper motor to move the dial and built a custom controller for it. The dial has butterfly knob in the center which must be rotated before and after each combination. That job is handled by a hobby servo. The torque required to open the safe is higher than the stepper motor, so when the optical encoder detects that the motor has stalled you know you’ve found the combination.
Related: Automated Master Lock crackers
The Church of Wifi has been really busy since we last checked in with them. They showed a lot of cool projects yesterday. I was really impressed by the modded WRT54Gs that their members have been building. beakmyn’s self contained war driving box article was what really kicked this off. He covers adding GPS, SD card, and all the needed software to the WRT. Once completed all you have to do is plug the box in, go for a drive and then just pull the card when you get home to retrieve the data.
