Hack-a-day favorite [Sprite_tm] sent in another nice GP2X hack. He knew he had some space from his previous USB port adventure. He pulled a small reciever from a cheap SDIO GPS card and added it to his GP2x. He rounded it out with an ATTiny13 that’s used to power up the GPS only after it recieves a magic string from the onboard serial port.
We are entering our terrible twos which means we’re not above making stupid binary jokes like the one in the title. With the comments still broken, this year’s celebration is going to be pretty low key. You’ve got a few entertaining options though. Have a look at our first anniversary posts: first post and HADA01. Visit the Team Hack-A-Day forum for HAD’s Unofficial Folding@HOME Team. They do a lot more than just fold so feel free to ask for help if you’ve got a project you’re working on. You can also stop by #hackaday IRC channel on EFNet. Check out or current blogger, Will O’Brien’s how-to archive on Engadget. Engadget also got there hands on a Chumby recently. Will, Fabienne, and I will all be attending ToorCon in San Diego at the end of this month. It was my favorite conference from last year and definitely worth your time if you are in the area. Check out last year’s coverage. The staff at Hack-A-Day would like to thank all of the readers. Reader contributions to the tipline are what keep this site fresh every day.
Macmod released some of the first entries for their contest. James and Mick submitted their M3 Mobile Mac Mini. That’s a touchscreen lcd mounted in the rear, Up front it’s equipped with video halogen lights and IR range sensors. The chassis is interfaced through a PIC 16F877A controller. You might want to check out the rest of the mods here.
John Sullivan’s projector suffered some unplanned damage. The mirror inside the projector that reflects light from the bulb was broken, rendering the unit useless. The mirror was an odd shape, so he cut up a platter from a sacrificial hard drive and made a replacement. If you’re looking for other projects for those old drives, I dug up a few. The hd motor anomemeter is interesting. The brushless motor can be used to generate AC current to calculate the speed.
[Hopefully comments will be back this week. I’ll get into the details when it’s fixed.]
Dive gear has become so commercialized that DIY diving equipment is almost frowned upon. The dive light group that lives on msn is full of design ideas and how-to’s for building some custom dive gear. My favorite is the HID cannister dive light. The light head is made from a maglite flashlight. Either a HID lamp/ballast made for ATVs or a cheap MR16 halogen is used. The batteries are contained in a seperate waterproof cannister. (Yes, I love to dive. I’ll be building some of these as soon as I buy a mini-lathe.)
[wraggster] was first to send in the latest news on PSP hacking. Yesterday a firmware downgrader was released to take PSPs running v2.71 down to the homebrew friendly v1.5 firmware. The authors took advantage of a tiff expolit to get it working and apparently bricked four PSPs in the process. Looks like it’s working, but there are plenty of caveats to read up on before giving it a shot.
Ian wrote a nice instructables how-to on building a USB thermometer using a PIC 18F2550. It’s surface mount, but that’s doable with a very fine tip and all parts are available through-hole. The controller provides all the I/O needed for the USB interface and the data collection. It looks like a great intro for building USB interfaces to your projects. He also wrote up how to syndicate the data for the web.
Dylan Field sent us our first Chumby hack tip. Oh, and I got a new daughter too. (So I’m a little tired.)
