Yo dawg, we heard you liked macs. [Charles] got sick of his Mac mini looking nice and pretty and decided to cram it into an old beige box. This old beige box just happened to be an old Apple II disk drive, so we guess that gives it some more street cred. The original disk drive sold in 1978 for $500. Man times have changed.
[thanks BluRy]
[Mr. Hasselhoff] is using a disposable cell phone to trigger his fireworks. He has wired into the speaker leads for the speaker phone. When the phone rings, the current sets off a thyristor allowing for a battery pack to be discharged into a rocket fuse. These fuses heat up and ignite, so you can use them to light fireworks fuses pretty easily. This is pretty simple and cheap, considering the price of the cell phone was only $10. His next idea was to have it recognize dial tones and set individual fuses off, but that would require a microcontroller and a much more complex hack. At that point, you might as well just build a fully fledged wireless fireworks launching system and possibly add rocket launching abilities too.
[thanks Adam]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMuDudCiPR8]
firstly, we don’t know why they are doing this, and we don’t care. You are watching an LED panel, controlled by molten metal. The panel has the leads sticking down below the bottom of the board, so the metal can make connections as it flows past. They are using Wood’s metal, not mercury so it has to be heated to about 159 degrees Fahrenheit to be fluid. This has been representing problems as the metal tends to stick to whatever container he is holding it in. That actually seems to be what most of the writeup and discussion are about, rather than, what it will be used for.
[Thanks Andre]
Though the inspiration was said to have come from a clip of The Young Ones, we all know this was bound to happen eventually. [lemonie] has turned a VHS deck into a toaster. They’ve done a fantastic job, it looks almost perfectly stock. We can imagine that maintaining the look of the VCR was pretty difficult especially getting everything to line up correctly. Finally, we have a use for our old VHS deck. You can see a video of it in action after the break.
[Dave] sent us these fantastic instructions on how to hack a rear projection tv to be a multitouch interface. They’ve converted a 67″ inch TV by adding a couple of PS3 eye cameras and an infrared laser plane. There’s lots of great information, like how to replace the lenses on the PS3 eye cameras and how to create the custom fittings needed to make it all fit nicely. You can download the code, but it is Mac only. They claim that this is the first conversion of a commercial rear projection TV to multitouch, but we know better. You can see a video of it in action after the break.
[Brian] sent in this writeup on his voice controlled home automation system. Starting with the Microsoft SAPI, a voice recognition system, he programmed some basic home automation. In a move that makes this project decidedly more awesome, he decided to build a physical representation of his automation system. This disembodied head is “Stephanie”. She responds to her name, has an articulated jaw that moves with the syllables in the words, and even ejects her “brain tray” on command. We want one.
There is lots of information on his site about the circuitry involved, as well as source code and a video. You can see the video after the break.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htd3s50Zhk8]
[Pedram] Sent us his USB missile launcher interface project. He happened to have some of the USB missile launchers lying around. having lost their initial draw, he wanted to do something to spice it up. He wrote an interface in python so he could control the launcher via his iPhone. We don’t see how this is any different than controlling them by the computer, but he seems to have put a decent amount of work into it.
