It wasn’t [Ben Heck] this time. [Owen] sent in his modded iPod. Once the warranty was voided by some breakage, he decided to make sure it was *really* void. The fold is limited by the length of the wires – but I can’t tell from the description or pictures if he actually hinged it.
Update: I’m re-posting this thanks to some funky cms bug…
[Juergen] sent in his catcam project built. He used an inexpensive 1.3mp keychain camera with an ATTINY2313. The controller keeps the camera shut down until it’s time to take a picture. Then it powers it up, takes the shot, and returns to low-power mode. The cat adventures are actually kind of interesting. It wouldn’t work from under the car, but anyone feel like gps tracking their cat?
I’m on a 1-wire/home automation kick lately. It looks like he’s giving up on the router platform, but [barebottoms] did some interesting work with a couple of wireless routers (a belkin that he fried, and then onto a wrt54g) to create automated controls for his reef. Think of it as home automation for the fishes. It’s an interesting idea – a hacked wireless router could make a fairly robust and power efficient controller for simple HA applications. His site isn’t really that informative, I found the forum posts more interesting.
This is sort of a follow up to the diy A/C zone control post. It’s a pretty simple circuit, but now they’ve posted schematics for building your own 1-wire controlled servo actuators. It requires external power – so they’re supplying 15v via cat-5/RJ-45s. This isn’t limited to home automation, this could lead to some interesting 1-wire robotics projects.
[john] sent in his version of a power meter monitor. It’s designed to monitor the blinking light on the meter to monitor the current power usage. The light flashes in proportion to the amount of power being used, so it was a matter of using a ldr/photoresistor to capture the output and feed it to the parallel port of his computer. To finish it up, he used a shell script to feed the data into MRTG.
I was looking for some interesting ideas for using lithium polymer cells and stumbled across this diy flashlight. (It’s on geocities, so hit the cache.) Flashlights aren’t usually that interesting, but this one uses a pair of li-poly cells and a PWM signal generated by a pic controller to regulate the power to the lamp using a IRL1404 MOSFET. It still requires an external li-poly charger, but looks like a nice project to get into li-poly and PWM applications.
La Fonera’s are getting pretty popular lately. [Lefinnois] hacked his to get i2c working. He used a 75LS05 to adapt the io levels, and some bit banging in the software to pull it off. Now the Fonera can be used for inexpensive remote monitoring via inexpensive i2c devices. Not to mention that this could provide a cheap network interface for various micro-controller projects. (I’m thinking networked thermostat for my new house.)
