Robert Brown sent in his iPod hd adapter. Sure, you could buy an Addonics 1.8″ toshiba to ide adapter for $15; but he didn’t mind soldering up the 50 wires to connect his drive to a USB IDE adapter. To finish it out, he put everything into an enclosure and added an eject button.
Month: October 2006
C64 Alpha Mod
David Terrill sent in his new c64 project. It’s almost an end-all c64 mod. He lopped off the back half of the case, added s-video, a piggybacked secondary sound chip, 1/4″ audio, stereo input, audio feedback, a serial port, DIN sync… and more. If you dig c64s or hardware bending, check out his write up.
Hackaday Extra
I spent 14 hours at airports today, after staying up all night. My internet access at Toorcon was bandwith starved, so I wanted to catch up a bit. I’ll try to highlight more Toorcon stuff later in the week.
[Clinton] and [bart] both sent in Clinton’s electric shock alarm clock. (Don’t even think about building one of these things, it could kill someone if you’re not careful.)
[capagotks] sent in his USB refitted hand crank LED flashlight.
I got this a few times, so here’s a simple work surface made from an old PC case. (I use self healing cutting mats.)
[Ian] presents us with a bunch of cell phone repair (and upgrade?) information. Let me know if you actually rebuild a broken phone. The most likely scenario would be LCD replacement.
[Jim] sent in these candy(sugar) powered rockets. sweet!
Finally, [Leigh Norton] in Essex (Yes, Essex.) has an HP pen plotter like the one used to make a vinyl cutter. Post if you want it and maybe he’ll give it to you.
Toorcon Hard Drive Data Recovery
Eliot and I caught Scott Moulton’s talk on Hacking Hard Drives for Data Recovery. You can catch his slides here – but most of the content was in the talk. It was a great walk through of hard drive technology. Some interesting points: 85% of the time, software recovery is successful. 10% of the time, replacing the controller board succeeds. So, 95% of the time you can probably recover your data fairly easily.
Scott showed off a peltier enhanced drive sled for keeping a drive cooled for optimal operation/recovery conditions. He even got into replacing drive heads. If you’ve ever gutted a drive, you’ll know how fragile those heads are. You can actually fold a postit note to keep the heads apart and tranfer an arm with heads from a donor drive to get your drive working again. The difficulty of the operations seem to increase exponentially as the number of platters increases.
Newton Web Server
[Ian] sent in this Newton web server. [The page is served by the newton, I doubt it’ll handle our load] Apparently there’s still a good following for the handy message pads. (I really wanted a 120 when they came out) This one’s running newton personal data sharing to deliver its web interface.
