I was dredging my brain for interesting topics to cover and this vertical blind hack popped into my head. The page isn’t the prettiest, but it’s the hack that counts. The mechanism is constructed from PC board. A motor fitted with a ball chain drive gear pulls the chain in either direction. When the end of travel is reached, a micro-switch is triggered by the stand off that’s actuated by the chain. The motor is driven by a pair of relays that latch to form a simple direction control. When power is triggered on or off, the motor starts moving until the stop is triggered.
Month: September 2007
Hard Drive Clock (not A Lame Clock With A Hd Face)
[Fred] sent in this awesome hard drive clock. Nope, just parts of a HD into a clock, but the actual drive mechanism and heads are used for this one. The arms move in and out to indicate minutes and the platter position is used to show the hour. It uses a 50hz clock, logic chips and some scrounged parts to get it all done.
Electric Screwdriver Antenna Tuning
I just realized that we’d never covered the classic amateur radio antenna hack – known as the mobile electric screwdriver antenna. I was looking for a decent writeup, and ran across this interesting tunable indoor antenna. [W2BRI] put together a 5 foot cube loop antenna built from copper pipe. The tuning mechanism uses an electric screwdriver to tune his giant PC Board tuning capacitor. Looks like a nice solution if you’re into radio and have pesky neighbors.
Another GPS Logger
[leatix] sent in this one after seeing the weather balloon logger the other day. In this case, it’s built around a Mega8, stores the log on a MMC/SD card and runs on a LiIon battery. Translating it was a bit problematic for me, but give it a shot if you feel lucky.
Mega8 Logic Tester
[Ast] sent in his time sampling logic analyser (in German, so use the fish) based on a Atmel Mega8 and a FT232 USB interface and several logic chips. It can store time captures in memory, then upload them to a PC via USB. Looks like a great tool for advanced logic testing.
Simple GPS Data Logger
[Stefan] sent in this data logger that was built for a weather balloon project. It’s a very clean design that logs to a 64KB eeprom, can transmit its location via SMS through a cell phone and trigger a camera based on position if needed. The site has a tarball will full schematics and source – mod away.
Dual Nic Laptop Mod
[Robert] opened up his old alienware laptop and installed an Intel Pro 100 mini-pci ethernet card. Then He replaced the modem port with the second ethernet jack. The hardware side is pretty simple, but getting the port soldered to a new custom cable and fitted to the case was the hard part.
