We’ve covered a few tesla coils, but somehow we never hit this classic – making your own jacobs ladder. The spark climbing the increasing gap between a pair of electrodes is easy enough to create – just get a high voltage transformer (like a neon sign transformer), make a set of insulated electrodes and wire things up.
Now that I’ve mentioned a couple of HV sources, I can point to this set of awesome high voltage photos from the same guy that put together the portable tesla coil.
[bodiby] was first to send in this New Scientist article about converting a DVD drive into a lab scanner. I did some digging and came up with the details. Here’s the paper describing the process and results. Here’s a basic schematic and description of the mod. A set of samples is placed onto a CDR. A photo sensor is used to locate the samples on the CD, while the laser is fired through each sample. A planar photodiode is used to measure the attenuation of the laser as it’s transmitted through each sample. Sadly, I couldn’t find any details on the custom control electronics.
I spent part of my weekend with some sort of stomach virus, so Eliot stepped in for me yesterday. I’m taking next week off, so we’ll have a special guest starting Friday – but I’m not revealing who just yet.
[Fickara] sent in his AVR interface(in Italian) for an Oregon Scientific remote weather station. Thanks to the AVR, data is output via RS232. There are quite a few less expensive weather stations – usually PC output models are over $100, so this could be pretty handy. His page has several other projects including an oscope clock, POV on a stick, etc.
I was looking for streaming solutions the other day. Little did I know that [John] would be sending in a hack for adding an mp3 decoder board to the La Fonera. The final device has both a web and command line interface which let you connect to any shoutcast/icecast streaming server. John has even gone so far as to provide the Openwrt image for the router with all of the software components you need.
[Xantium] let me know about the latest from the XBox Scene. The attack that was just a proof of concept is now a fully released hack. [Robinsod] released details on how to perform the ‘Timing Attack’ in order to downgrade the 360s kernel to a hackable version. The hack requires an infectus mod chip, a PIC interface built around a 16F876A and a software package to get things rolling. The big deal is that you can now downgrade your 360 from any kernel to an exploitable version. Considering the previous limitations, this is pretty exciting news for the homebrew crowd.
[Coley] sent in this port of jetpack for the propeller uc, but when I started poking around I discovered this sweet hybrid robot platform. A four stroke Robin/Subaru 35cc motor drives a car alternator, providing virtually unlimited (in the robot world) power on demand. Hit the video after the break for a quick R/C demo and an idea of how loud the engine is. Offhand, I recognize the lovejoy coupler that was used to connect the engine to the alternator.
By the way, this bot is featured in the latest Robot magazine, so you can get details there if you hate reading forums.
Ever had a USB cable sticking out of your laptop bag? I’ve done it many time while I’ve been traveling. James built a simple right angle USB cable so he could keep things tucked away and damage free. He epoxied a connector to some proto board, then soldered things back together.
