Hackaday Links: July 13, 2012

Testing LEDs

Over at the Albuquerque, NM hackerspace Quelab, [Alfred] needed to test a bunch of surface mount LEDs. He ended up building a pair of 3D printed tweezers with a pair of needles attached to the end and a space for a coin cell battery. It works and Quelab got a new tool.

Woo Raspberry Pi

[tech2077] added an FTDI chip to his Raspberry Pi to do a little single cable development. We’ve seen a few similar builds, but surprisingly nothing related to the on board display serial interface. This wiki page suggests it’s possible to connect an iPhone 3G or iPhone 4 display directly to the Raspi. Does anyone want to try that out?  Nevermind, but it would be cool to get a picture from a display plugged into that display port on the Raspi.

I like to ride my bicycle, I like to ride my bike

Over at the 23b hackerspace a few people were having trouble finding a good bike cargo rack that wasn’t overpriced. They built their own with $30 in materials and a salvaged milk crate. It looks great and is most likely a lot more durable than the Walmart model.

If that cargo rack fell off, it would look like this

Apparently you can get ‘spark cartridges’ to attach to the underside of a skateboard. [Jim] saw these would look really cool attached to his bike so he did the next best thing. He attached them to his sandals. It does look cool…

Less heat, less noise

[YO2LDK] picked up a TV tuner dongle for software radio and found it overheated and stopped working after about 15 minutes (Romanian, Google Translate). He hacked up a heat sink from an old video card to solve this problem. Bonus: the noise was reduced by a few tenths of a dB.

10 thoughts on “Hackaday Links: July 13, 2012

  1. The wiki is wrong over the iphone screens for the raspberry pi, even if you do manage to connect one, you won’t be getting a picture out of it, there are no dsi drivers (it’s all in the gpu, so you won’t be rolling your own either).

    Glad we cleared that up. For latest news and up to date information on the raspberry pi you should always check the http://www.raspberrypi.org website and forums or the #raspberrypi IRC channel on freenode.

    1. Don’t forget it’s only ones and zero’s, there is always a way for someone with far too much time on their hands.
      (You could always just bit bang to the screen until you get a picture) – haha

      1. I don’t think it’s as simple as that, bitbanging would be pretty pointless and as far as I know wouldn’t be happening via the dsi pins, you might as well grab one of the other solutions out there that do work (spi, hdmi, dvi, composite, vga to dvi).

        Of course there’s no stopping the most determined of people trying to hack the pi’s gpu but the foundation are looking at a screen to go on the pi anyway.

      2. The GPU’s undocumented hardware managed by an undocumented binary blob running on an undocumented processor core. An awful lot of reverse engineering would be required to get the DSI port working.

  2. I did what [YO2LDK] did with his TV tuner dongle with an old Belkin usb wifi dongle a while back, the connection used to drop out after about ten minutes of surfing, and it used to get very hot, too hot to touch the chips inside (so not ideal). I actually ended up with three heat sinks on mine and a two fans one on top and one under neath, (and yes it did get that hot) some of the cheaper products are actually rather useless. After all the modifications it still only extended the useful time span of the connection to a few hours.
    I ended up buying a new one a few months later but that still leaves me with something that would be “good enough” for a later project (:

  3. Let’s see…
    Spark pads on sandals. Spark pad catches on something on the road, drags foot too far over, foot and ankle catch on pedal and the piggies are now scraping the ground instead of the spark pad because he is wearing open toe footwear on a bike. If he is able to recover from this – scrapped, burned toes is the only injury. Otherwise I see a lot of bandaids and bactine in his future. This would be the shop == of wearing gloves while using the drill press.

    1. You may want to move into a rubber-padded room and not ever move a muscle ;-)

      Come on, a few bruises and knocks did not hurt the rest of us as kids, and we did not even have the internet to warn us about how stupid the idea were that we were about to (attempt) to pull of.

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