Given the variety of… uh, non-traditional hardware that’s connected to my home theater, I’ve found the ground isolation provided by optical TOSLINK connections pretty handy. After poking around a bit, I found a stand alone coax to optical converter. It uses a hex inverter to convert the signals to TTL levels, and a Sharp (or toshiba with some extra components) optical transmitter.
Month: December 2006
DIY Russian EL Display
Well, I’m pretty sure this is a hand made radioactive (as in Radium) electroluminescent display. The original post was in Russian, and it’s translated version doesn’t read very coherently. It appears they they borrowed a street sign, melted the radium paint down and painted their own display. In the end, they wired it up to a Sinclair Z80. Funky. Thanks [Viktos]
USB Airsoft Turret
[Jared] over at inventgeek.com remembers to think of us whenever he finishes up one of his projects. His latest is an USB Airsoft gun turret based on one of those USB nerf dart turrets. Hrm, this could make a decent base for a defconbots entry. It sounds like he’ll be building an even deadlier expensive version later on.
Don’t forget, December 25th is the deadline for your Design Challenge entries!
Easy DIY USB Interface
[Hybrid] tipped me to the ‘CREATE USB’ interface project. In truth it’s nothing more or less than a nice, (fairly) simple project to provide hardware hackers with a handy USB interface. It’s based on the PIC 18F4550 processor. If you check out the project, you’ll note that not only do they have a nice board to put a SMD PIC onto, they provide everything you need to build a diy version using perfboard. The most expensive component is of course the $10 PIC, but if you’re on a budget, that can be mitigated with a request for samples. (don’t abuse it – I think they’ve already cut back on sample amounts due to over-use.)
Hey, don’t forget, the Design Challenge deadline is the 25th. (This wouldn’t make a bad entry with some adaptation…)
Fab@home
I’ve received a few tips on this, and somehow it keeps slipping by. The fab@home project immediately reminds me of reprap. This is a completely open source hardware project for rapid prototyping/3d modeling. In the past, manufacturing something like a turkey baster bulb required injection molding. The project wiki has full details on building your own, including manufacturing houses to get all the acrylic laser cut. It looks like you could get your hands on one of these pretty easily if you don’t mind making a dent in your wallet. Thanks to [nickjohnson] and [peter B]. [peter B] also noted that the cornell boys have an even nicer one that they use to make zinc-air batteries and artificial muscles.
If you happen to be in Berlin on December 27th, you might want to sign up for Fabienne’s wifi detector hacking workshop at 23c3.
Late Night Mini-extra
I’ve been pulling some long days between driving everyone around in the snow and winding up the HD projector How-To. I’ve received a few more entries to the Design Challenge. You’ve got ’til Christmas!
[bruce land] pointed us to Cornel’s ECE576 final projects. The results using FPGAs are pretty impressive.
[jbauer] noted this site on hacking Insteon power controls sans the $200 SDK.
[dayne] sent along his USB xmas lights how-to. Pretty simple, but useful for cube decorating.
[pillowcase] tuned another innocent bluetooth headset into a bluetooth sound interface. (Goodwill gets these things now?)
Oh, and if you want ethernet for your xmas tree/candelabra/etc, these guys show you how.
I was pondering building a new karkomp, and was happy to find that there’s actually an open source nav program.
Wireless Video Scanner
[aboxman] brought this nice wavecom jr mod to my attention. I first ran across scanning for wireless video signals a couple years ago when the X10 version came out. People were surprised at just how many video signals were flying through the air.This little project results in a unit that can scan a wide 2.3 to 2.7Ghz range. Of course, if you’re across the pond, you might want a european version.
