Modern Recordings On Wax Cylinder

June 1, 2010 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

If you thought you’d never have a chance to release your hit single on the wax cylinder think again. A band obsessed with the Victorian era did just that, having a DIY’er produce the cylinders for them. The story was covered by the BBC and includes a lousy attempt to build a phonograph to play back the recording. The video shows their craftsmanship (or lack of it) but it’s not even in the same realm as the masterpiece we saw last September. You do, however, get to see the production equipment used at about 2:45 into the clip.

[Thanks Charles]

Stomp Box Synthesizer

June 1, 2010 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

[Brian McNamara] fed the output of his guitar pedal back into its input creating a looped synthesizer. He started with an effects pedal he made but now we think he’s ended up with an electronic stomp box. Check out the results in the video after the break. Now he needs to make the knobs foot-friendly so he can monkey with this while playing guitar.

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JTAG Programming Over A Network

June 1, 2010 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

[Matt Evans] was running up against the common programming gotcha caused by disappearing parallel ports. For years he had used a JTAG parallel cable when working with FPGAs but recently realized he no longer owned any machines with that interface available. Instead of shelling out $50 for a USB programmer he a programming interface from an old router.What he’s doing is bit-banging using Linux. In this case it’s a router running a version of Linux which makes his setup Internet friendly but this could be done in the same basic manner on any Linux device with enough available I/O to connect to the device you are programming.

IRobot Gets Awesome Exploding Rope Thingy

June 1, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 40 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3jab7rnIL0]

The iRobot Warrior 710 is shown here touting a new toy called an APOBS or Anti-Personnel Obstacle Breaching System. The system is comprised of an explosive rope pulled by a rocket. We know that sounds pretty awesome, and you can see in the video that it is, in fact, pretty awesome. We don’t condone violence, or war. We do, however, love blowin’ stuff up. This footage was just so pretty, we thought we had to share it. What’s even more amazing is that these guys aren’t battling Apple over the name iRobot.

[via botjunkie]

Switchmode LED Flashlight Upgrade

June 1, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 11 Comments

When [Neelandan]’s cheap flashlight’s internal rechargeable battery died, he scrounged for a replacement. Ultimately, the brightness of the light suffered with his new battery, taken from an old cell phone since he had dropped the voltage a bit. Upon inspection he saw that he would have to swap the individual resistors for each lamp to get the desired brightness again. This wasn’t really acceptable as he would have to repeat the process if he used another re-purposed battery with different specs. Instead, he added a new circuit to supply constant brightness until the voltage drops below 2.7 volts. We love to see hardware resurrected, even if it is just a cheap LED flashlight.