I’m feeling a bit retro for the holidays, so here’s another classic: If you’ve got a non-dimming X10 switch, you’ve experienced the incredibly loud, obnoxious sound that it makes when you switch it on or off. (Mine’s in my stairwell) There’s a simple mod to silence the thing: remove the triac relay and replace it with a solid state relay. SSRs are a bit expensive, running at least $10 each last time I checked. [Willis Dair] realized that he could build his own, inexpensive SSR with an optoisolator and an alternistor(AKA Triac). The resulting circuit runs about $3 in parts.
Month: December 2007
PID Controlled Popcorn Popper Coffee Roaster
In honor of my espresso machine being fully plumbed in (water supply and drain line!) it’s time for another coffee hack. When I wrote my basic coffee roaster how-to, I seriously thought that I’d never see anyone do this, but [] installed a programmable PID controller on his popper coffee roaster setup. This particular PID can be programmed to ramp the temperature over time to create an actual roasting profile, rather than manually adjusting the set points. The original page was here, but I had to pull it out of the internet archive.
Nightvision Car Heads Up Display
[alti] wants night vision for his car, so he picked up a nightmax night vision camera that has a built in LCD. The plan is to mount the display so that it will reflect off the windshield of his car to create a simple HUD. Unfortunately the image gets reflected from the inside and outside of the windshield. The discussion in the forum is getting pretty lengthy, but it’s an interesting project.
DIY LED Multi-touch Panel
DDR Pacman (AKA DDR Pad Rewiring)
[Jason] sent in his low-tech, but interesting hack to allow the use of a DDR pad with his Gameboy advance to play PacMan. He took a $15 DDR pad, gutted it and wired directly to each of the foil pads that he wanted to use as buttons. For his project, he simply wired each pad directly to the DPad buttons on his Gameboy. It’s really a pre-manufactured version of [fbz] zone switches that she built for her backpack strap wifi detector.
By the way, [matt] over at Instructables wanted me to let you guys know that they’re giving away a $15k Versalaser.
IPhone GPS Module
The boys over at engadget put this up while I was working it over, but I’m still gonna hit it. [Curt] sent in the iPhone GPS he put together. He’s using a micro-controller to send the ground toggle handshake we mentioned in the iPhone serial tutorial, along with a small NMEA serial GPS module. After the handshake is completed, the controller hands over the serial port to the GPS output. (Since the handshake only needs the ground toggle, I’d guess that the module is connected to the TX/RX lines all the time.) By the way, the GPS looks like this SiRF II board sold by spark fun electronics.
IPod Transmitter Radio Modem
[Eric] sent in his iPod transmitter radio modem hack (Internet Archive). Given the short range of these FM modulators (and FCC rules) I’d call this an academic exercise. Combined with a few mods, it could be useful for bursting data from a micro-controller. (Think APRS)
Asus EeePC Bonus:About a week ago, [johnx] added (Internet Archive) a 16GB flash drive and a bluetooth adapter to his. Yesterday, [ta2cba] showed off how he squeezed (Internet Archive) a four port hub inside his – allowing a pair of devices to live in the extra min-ipcie bay and leave two ports to spare for later add-ons.
