Hackaday Links: July 19, 2015

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Everybody needs an external USB drive at some time or another. If you’re looking for something with the nerd cred you so desperately need, build a 5 1/4″ half height external drive. That’s a mod to an old Quantum Bigfoot drive, and also serves as a pretty good teardown video for this piece of old tech.

The Woxun KG-UV2D and KG-UV3D are pretty good radios, but a lot of amateur radio operators have found these little handheld radios eventually wear out. The faulty part is always a 24C64 Flash chip, and [Shane] is here to show you the repair.

Last year there was a hackathon to build a breast pump that doesn’t suck in both the literal and figurative sense. The winner of the hackathon created a compression-based pump that is completely different from the traditional suction-based mechanism. Now they’re ready for clinical trials, and that means money. A lot of money. For that, they’re turning to Kickstarter.

What you really need is head mounted controls for Battlefield 4. According to [outgoingbot] it’s a hacked Dualshock 4 controller taped to a bike helmet. The helmet-mounted controller has a few leads going to another Dualshock 4 controller with analog sticks. This video starts off by showing the setup.

[Jan] built a modeling MIDI synth around a tiny 8-pin ARM microcontroller.  Despite the low part count, it sounds pretty good. Now he’s turned his attention to the Arduino. This is a much harder programming problem, but it’s still possible to build a good synth with no DAC or PWM.

7 thoughts on “Hackaday Links: July 19, 2015

    1. “arduino, Battlefield, breast pump” would scare the hell out of me! Oh and as for the bigfoot/usb drive mod, he should have knotted the USB cable, if you swung that thing hard enough it could hurt like hell.

  1. I didn’t use an archaic 5 1/4″ bigfoot drive but I’ve done the same hack with a dead 3 1/2″ except that I used a usb hub and 4 flash drives.

    I mounted mine in an empty drive bay with a (not all that) hidden power switch for the hub. For v2 I was thinking of looking for a 12v hub so I could route the power through ths molex plug. Thought about running the usb data lines through the original IDE plug and a custom ribbon cable to an unused USB header on the motherboard for some ultra-covert storage.

    Briefly thought about making the flash drives a JBOD raid array to appear as one drive instead of 4 drives. Then I saw 8 and 10 port USB hubs and started to lose interest when I started thinking about the cost of doing it with 8 or 10 32/64 gig flash drives…

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