[Anthony] has transformed a simple router board into a fully fledged Debian system. The board is an RB433AH which has a 680Mhz development board with 3 LAN ports and 3 Mini PCI slots intended for routing tasks. At roughly $150, this could be a pretty versatile tool to have around. Possibly more useful than the SheevaPlug.
We’ve covered automated plant growing before, but that project might be overkill for many situations. Many of us don’t need our plants to have facial expressions either. Sometimes, we just need a little bit of help. This automated grow light is a nice little project that supplies decent light when necessary. You can download the source files on the tutorial. It is currently set to supply an additional 4 hours of light, detecting the low light levels to turn it on.
[rog8811] shared his laser lighter with us. He has gutted a zippo style lighter and inserted a blue ray laser module. The old fuel compartment houses the batteries. This is pretty cool, though it might take forever to actually light a cigarette with it. His build log is quite nice with diagrams and detailed pictures of the whole process. Our question is simple, why haven’t we seen this on a James Bond film? Too bad he couldn’t use a stronger laser, like from a laser cutter. We know they do a fine job of cutting pizzas.
Building your own CPU sounds like quite a daunting task as it is. Building your own CPU using manual wire wrapping transcends difficult to become an art form. [Steve] has built a CPU by manually wrapping every single wire. That’s 1253 wires, or 2506 wrapped ends. Even if it didn’t work, it would be nice to look at. But it does work, you can see a demo video showing the audio functions after the break. The system is now enclosed in an Acer x-terminal case, so it isn’t as pretty, but its still quite a project. You can follow along as he builds each section, the video, sound, even the keyboard interface. It’s pretty amazing seeing it all broken down to the most basic forms.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrwMSQP-qPg]
[Logicdustbin] sent in his iCast project. He gutted a blue iMac and inserted a DreamCast and an LCD. It looks very nice. His ports on the front seem almost factory installed. You can follow his build on the cgcc forums.
[Barney_1] built this sereial RSS reader. He’s using the Dragon Rider 500 development board, which is a kit that has expansions available including the LCD, serial interface, and power supply. You don’t need the kit though, you could just build your own with similar specs. He has written a program in python to scrape RSS feeds and send them to the LCD. He’s got some specific workarounds for the Dragon Rider board if you do have one. You can download the firmware and source code on his site. You can see a video of it after the break.
This little wall plug is actually a full computer with 1.2GHz cpu, with 512MB of RAM and 512MB of of flash memory. It comes with versions of linux, ported for its ARM processor. At $50, this cool system could be finding itself in a lot of homes. You can get more information from the manufacturer. What uses can you think of for it?
[thanks, everyone who sent this in]
