PC Cooling Using 1000 Ft^2 Geothermal

March 22, 2010 by Mike Szczys 36 Comments

Are you still using heat sinks and fans to cool your computer? Lame. Tearing up your property to bury geothermal coils is definitely the way to go. [Romir] has been working on this for about a month and is just getting back data from the first multi-day tests. Take some time to dig through his original post. It includes something of a table-of-contents for the 35 updates he’s posted so far. Closed loop cooling seems to be trendy right now, we just didn’t expect to see a system this large as part of a personal project. The last one we looked at used just six meters of pipe.

Snega2usb Changes Name, Learns New Tricks

March 22, 2010 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

[Matthias Hullin], the creator of the snega2usb let us know that its name has been changed to the Retrode. We watched this device go through the development cycle and learn to read SNES and Sega Genesis cartridges via a USB connection. Now it’s seeing some hacking to extend those capabilities. [Jon] managed to rig the Retrode up to read Virtual Boy cartridges. The Virtual Boy was a Nintendo console from the mid ’90s that used two different screens in a glasses format to produce a 3D gaming experience. Now that the cartridges can be easily dumped you have a chance to replay the titles using an emulator.

GPU Cooling To Fix RRoD

March 22, 2010 by Mike Szczys 64 Comments

[Rbz] fixed his friend’s Red Ring of Death stricken Xbox 360 by improving the GPU cooling. Because an overheating GPU is a common cause of the failure, he first tried to replace the thermal compound for better heat conductivity between the chip and the heat sink. This helped a bit but within two hours the problem was back. Troubled by the heat discoloration on the bottom of the DVD drive, he removed it and screwed a cooling fan to the GPU heat sink. That did the trick, so he moved the drive to the outside of the case with the aid of a longer SATA cable. It’s not pretty, but it worked.

Light Up Your Ride With An LED Mohawk

March 22, 2010 by Mike Szczys 21 Comments

[Garrett Birkel’s] weekly ride usually features some pretty wild costumes. He wanted something to step up his own look so he make this LED mohawk bike helmet. He had an LED strip to start with and found a way to use acrylic and clear plastic tubing to fold the lights into the appropriate shape. From there he designed a PCB for some DC-DC converters to provide regulated power. The juice comes from Lithium Iron-Phosphate cells, the same kind we saw in the electric bike assist battery a few days ago. We find it a bit wild that you can pick out the PWM of the LEDs in the lens effect of that photograph.

More Functional GPS In Minutes

March 21, 2010 by Jakob Griffith 32 Comments

[Sparky] notified us of his hack to allow interaction with the core of an Aldi GO Cruise 4300 GPS Windows CE OS. All that’s required is a few programs and registry edits to the GPS, which anyone can accomplish within a few minutes. But we suggest you go slow and double-check your work; nobody wants a bricked system. After you’re done you can run such great programs like the one [Sparky] suggest for 4WD enthusiasts, Ozi Explorer.

PIC Based USB Input Devices

March 21, 2010 by Mike Szczys 39 Comments

USB is convenient and that makes it desirable in many many projects. [Simon Inns] has the process down and is sharing it with his recent PIC based USB tutorial. Prompted by requests for help on the matter after having published a post about his Commodore 64 interface, he set out to detail the particulars when it comes to using the PIC 18F family as USB input devices. This example uses a PIC 18F4550 with the circuit built on a breadboard. There’s not much required here, an oscillator, a few passives, and a USB B connector. The magic really happens in the code. Take a look at this well-written guide and give it a try with your next project.

Don’t need USB? [Simon’s] game hack, the Ultimate Simon is always worth another look too.

Ask Hackaday: Now A Regular Occurrence

March 21, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 32 Comments

A while back, we announced that we would be bringing new features to Hackaday. One in particular that garnished a lot of interest was our question answer type thingy. Well, in case you hadn’t noticed, that has not happened yet. Without divulging too much into the secret machinery that lies underneath Hackaday, I’ll just say that we(the writers) don’t necessarily have control over all aspects of the site. An example would be the copyright. Yes, we finally got it updated. Thanks for all of your emails. No, none of us had access to that part of the site, so don’t bother letting us know how simple that change should have been.

We are as eager as you to see some good ideas and good feedback flowing through this site, so we’re going to start a regular post, entitled “Ask Hackaday”. This isn’t entirely new, we’ve done it before actually. This is just to let you know that we intend to do it regularly, and to set some ground rules. “Ask Hackaday” will mostly center around you, our readers, and your ideas. We will publish a question, and possibly our thoughts, but the main content will be your responses. We have a huge collective of intelligent creative readers and it would be a shame not to tap into that pool of knowledge. When you are offering an answer, be thorough, give details, and please be kind.

Send your questions to askHAD@hackaday.com for consideration. They will be chosen based on a complicated system of random number variation involving furry woodland creatures and how we feel at the moment that we read them. Do not get offended if you question does not get published. We get tons of questions already and we don’t intend to publish them all.