[AndyUU1CC] has put together directions on how he built an Iambic Paddle out of some old hard drives. The iambic paddle is a device for telegraphy. More specifically, it is that piece that you always see people clicking with their finger when they send a telegraph. We hadn’t seen an iambic or “dual lever” style before, but we now know that this is not an uncommon design. While it is ultimately just a fancy set of switches, we can’t help but be impressed with the looks of it.
[via instructables]
[Michiel], unsatisfied by his Phillips wake up light, decided just to make his own. He really wanted programmable weekend alarms as well as an easier to find snooze button. At first, his circuit was not reliable enough, losing several minutes per hour, but he gutted another alarm for the 1Hz crystal. After some carpentry, his final alarm ended up quite nice. After so many aggressive alarm clocks, it’s nice to see that not everyone needs to be assaulted out of bed.
Correction: apparently, there’s no 1Hz crystal. That was a guess on my part. -[Caleb]
[via Hacked Gadgets]
Powerplant control room panoramas:
There are two power plants presented in 360 degree panoramas here. All those dials and switches just get us giddy. The one pictured above was built in 1918 and is still in operation. Not only are the control rooms here, but several other locations around the facility too.
Energy recycling prosthetic foot:
At first, we thought that this energy recycling prosthetic foot was going to be a power generating device to harvest some energy using our weight in the heel compression. Actually, it is showing off a fancy micro controller based system for reproducing our naturally springy step.
Translating in real time with google:
Google is working on a system to do real time translation of text on your phone. It is integrated into the “google goggles” software which allows you to search the internet using images from your phone. This is pretty cool, but with google translate and OCR being readily available for quite some time now, we have to wonder; why didn’t we think of that?
Exploded images of everyday objects:
[Adam Voorhes] has put together a small collection of exploded views of everyday objects. While they aren’t laid out great for reference, they look good and might make nice artwork in your workshop.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frtQXzt1_E0]
If you are anything like us, you find yourself needing, on occasion, to fling sausages at high velocity. [F00] sent in his solution, the SG19. While the details are glazed over pretty quickly, we get the point. This is basically a smaller diameter spud gun, meant to shoot sausage. While it may not be remarkable in its design, we have to wonder who came up with the idea to use sausage as the ammunition.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZB2K1wlaZo]
[thetanktheory] sent us his glove mouse modification. He has gutted his mouse and mounted the parts on a glove. This is interesting, as he doesn’t have to place his hand on the mouse any more, he just plops it down on any surface and starts mousing. He claims that it is helping his twitch reactions in gaming as somehow it requires less force, but we still see the circuit and batteries mounted on the back of his hand, so we’re not sure how it is helping. Maybe if he moved the laser to his finger tips, he’d be more accurate.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maB28gXoZV4]
The folks over at NerdKits got a shiny new Smithy 1220xl lathe/ mill. They found, however that adjusting the Z axis wasn’t as accurate as they desired. They decided to resolve this by installing a digital caliper and an LCD interface to display the adjustments. The writeup is quite detailed and the results seem to work great.
[F00] wrote in to show us his Eeepc that has been modded with almost every upgrade you can cram in one. He has an external cantenna for his wifi, an iPod hard drive, touch screen, added bluetooth with indicator lights, and an internal USB drive for booting linux. While the details are somewhat lacking on his site, you can find an article here for every piece you need to recreate his work. We’ve covered adding the touch screen, mounting external antennas, doing it all without solder, even changing the form factor. Not to mention the other Eeepc we’ve seen that was extremely well endowed.
