[Peter] brings us the oddest hack of the week. It’s a little esoteric, but interesting. This modified umbrella is used in conjunction with a giant world map outline. A camera takes note of the umbrella position and correlates the location. The user walks around and ‘experiences’ the weather in that location of the world. If you’d prefer to have everyone think you’re nuts, you could just interface it with your ipod.
Month: March 2007
Balancing One Wheel Scooter
Fresh off the tip line, [Ben] sent in his one wheeled balancing scooter. It’s a nice simple design – I just might have to build one myself. The steel frame surrounds a pair of 12V 12Ah SLA batteries, a 400w 24v DC motor, one of the ever handy OSMC motor controllers, rate gyro, accelerometer and a PIC 16F876A. I love the entire concept! (For some reason, I’m thinking it needs a brake light on the rear…
Check out the video after the cut. He walks through the hardware at the end.
By the way, Eliot and I’ll be at Shmoocon in a couple of weeks. We won’t have boards from the Design Challenge yet, but we should have something to give away to people who find us there.
PSP PS2 Controller
[F00 f00] over at acidmods put together this PS2 -> PSP controller. Using some similar techniques to [Ben Heck], he tapped all the control lines on his PSP and broke them out to what appear to be mini-usb connectors. Looking like a matrix subject, his PSP attaches to a dash board suction cup mount. Via pspnews thanks to [wraggster]
DIY ‘midi’ Footpedal
[forrest] passed along this diy foot-pedal ‘midi’ controller. It’s a good re-use of hardware, but not a true midi controller. The pcb was gutted from an old keyboard, and the pedals were scored from a mad 60 mile tour of the local radio shacks clearance bin. Since the pedals are simple momentary on switches, it was a matter of wiring them to the controller and using a laptop to generate signals via usb midi interface. Replace the keyboard pcb with a drum controller and you’d have an interesting stand alone solution.
Just so I could enjoy some extra crow, I managed to leave one other entry out of my published list of Design Challenge entries. [Jason] sent in this MEGA32 programmer/dev board. He kept it single sided, but you’ll need a parallel port to use it.
XBox 360 Homebrew A Comin’
Usually I like to see a full implimentation before posting stuff like this.. An anonymous developer put out some screen shots of his MAME360 app running on a developer system. Why care? A hop over to [Bunnie]‘s blog points out a recent vulnerability in the Xbox 360 Hypervisor. Thanks to [XanTium] for the original tip.
Ground Up Diy Laptop
[Chris] sent in his diy laptop. While it reminds me of the kid laptops at the toy store, it’s a nice effort. It’s got a PICAXE 18X microcontroller, 20×4 blue serial lcd, a laptop keyboard and runs his custom built language: chris++. Power comes from four AA batteries, and duct tape secures the electronics inside the wood case.
AVR Game Console
This is a bit reminiscent of the missing DC entry, so consider it a bonus hack. [Eric] sent in his latest project, an AVR game console. It uses a pair of ATMega168v micro-controllers, a nokia 3110 LCD, and an eeprom to store a selection of games. The interface above the console is the serial loader/charger. No word on the game source, but judging from his site, maybe he’s writing them all on his own.
