Bent Festival Begins Tonight

April 16, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 48 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6Pbyg_kcEk]

The Bent festival, which begins tonight in New York City, is a celebration of DIY musical instruments. Artists from all over converge to beep, blip, and strum for your pleasure. With a heavy emphasis on hacking your own instruments, this is definitely something we’re interested in. If you’ve only heard a little bit of circuit bending and didn’t like it, you may want to give it a try anyway. The musical genres are extremely diverse, it’s not all just random noise.

SPDIF Switch

April 16, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 58 Comments

switch

When [linux-works] found himself needing a switch that could convert coax to opto, he made one. The main chip is a cd4052 cmos analog switch, which he says is really cheap. The rest is pretty self explanatory. This setup can switch between 4 different inputs as well as do the coax to opto conversion.

Laser Projector Zippo

April 16, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 26 Comments

[vimeo=4130779]

If you’ve ever found yourself thinking, “I wish I had a laser projector hidden in a zippo”, then you’ll really appreciate this project. [Rog8811], who you might remember from the laser lighter, has made a spirograph style green laser projector that fits inside his zippo. This is very compact and you would have no idea it was there until you open it up. Just be careful, this seems perfect for causing eye damage to someone who isn’t expecting a laser to shoot out of your zippo.

Eeepc Picture Frame

April 15, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 24 Comments

eeepc_frame

We’ve all seen a million digital picture frames. Usually, people use an old outdated laptop or something. [Quinten] just sent in this one he made using an Eeepc 701. Being the first one available, the smallest both in terms of screen size and storage, they are available pretty cheap. There’s nothing amazingly groundbreaking here, just yanking all the parts out of the Eeepc and mounting them, nicely, in a wooden frame. [Quinten] did a great job getting everything in, with the least amount of space wasted. It strikes us that He has made a super cheap tablet conversion, he’s only missing the touch screen. We’ve seen Eeepc tablet conversions, but they seemed to have much more difficult to construct cases.

Mini Arcade Cabinets

April 15, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 23 Comments

mini-arcade

[Pocket_Lucho] has really done a fantastic job on this one. He’s making miniature arcade cabinets(translated) from old consoles. This post is mainly talking about a Sega genisis version, but he’s also done one for the PC engine(aka turbografix 16). He takes us through pulling RGB video strait from the chip as well as harvesting buttons from a cheapo all in one arcade controller. For the screen he’s using a PSone portable LCD, pretty much un modified. What really stands out is the final layout. He has built tiny arcade cabinets, about a foot tall, to house them. These are amazingly awesome and we want one. No, we want an entire mini arcade of them. You can see a video after the break.

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Microbot For The Robocup 2008

April 14, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 14 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMJJ2FJqsdI]

[tioguerra] helped make these tiny bots for the World Robocup 2008 in china. There’s tons of information on the Mixed Reality forum, but you might be specifically interested in the bot section. There are breakdowns of different aspects, such as charging and IR communication, as well as some great photographs of the unit along with a smaller one. The construction of the robot seems so nicely fit together, someone spent a lot of time getting the design just right. Since we don’t see a new section for 2009 bots, we are guessing that they’ll use this design again.

Hard Drive Speaker IPod Dock

April 14, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 16 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vEEx4rfugE]

This looks like someone watched the Obsolete Technology Band, and had to have one of their own. It appears to be a dock, driving several different sizes of old hard drives. While the concept isn’t new, we thought they did a decent job of putting the whole display together. It could be fun to have that mounted on our wall, waiting for geek friends to impress.