Author: Eliot

1332 Articles

ROV Capable Of Diving To 400 Feet

May 29, 2006 by 19 Comments

rov

My buddy Willy Volk at Divester has always been good about passing along stories about cool remote operated vehicles and this is no exception. A team of 8 engineering students at RIT have built an ROV capable of diving to 400 feet. Most schools design there ROVs for competition in pools, but the RIT seniors had a real-world goal: exploring shipwrecks in Lake Ontario. They built a lightweight aluminum frame and mounted batteries onboard. The ROV moves via four commercial thrusters controlled by an ATMega128. There are 3 video cameras plus HID lights. All control comes from a laptop using an RS-232 tether. More details are provided in their conference paper PDF.

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DDR Whack-a-mole

May 28, 2006 by 6 Comments

ddr whack a mole

Drew and Calvin built this DDR whack-a-mole game for their EECS 373 class. It’s powered by a Freescale MPC823. The processor controls eight servos with pictures of their friend Malav. The game runs for 20 seconds and then reports how many Malavs you’ve stepped on. They say that the hardest part of this project was figuring out how to properly read the Playstation DDR pad.

[thanks Ano nym ous]

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PCB Fuser For Toner Transfer Etching

May 27, 2006 by 36 Comments

fuser

We’ve covered the toner transfer method for creating circuit boards before. Instead of using an iron, Rich uses the fuser out of a laser printer to get consistent results. He wired a dimmer to the power supply to regulate the temperature. The fuser has a built in thermistor, so you can read the temp using an ohm meter. For rate control he built a stepper controller that connects to a parallel port. Using a simple program he’s able to control both speed and direction.

[thanks Fredasp]

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Macro Photography Light From Broken LCD Monitor

May 26, 2006 by 22 Comments

lcd panel

[Jussi Saarijoki] had a broken LCD monitor and decided to use it as a photography light instead of letting it sit on his shelf of “oblivion”. Only the panel was broken; the cold cathode and diffuser were still intact. He stripped off all of the outer casing and pulled the broken panel. After reassembling he did a couple test shots. The large panel works really well for providing ambient light and making shadows a lot less harsh.

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Apple // Game Server

May 25, 2006 by 17 Comments

apple II game server

Feeling a bit nostalgic, reader [blurry] decided to write this Apple Game Server in Java using the rxtx library. The server eliminates the need for a floppy drive on your Apple //. You just need to connect the Apple // to your computer using a null modem cable and you will have access multiple games. To get started you tell the Apple // to accept serial commands. Then the Java program takes over, typing the loader program one line at a time. It takes about 15 seconds. Once that’s done you’re presented with a menu to boot whatever game you want.

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Burning Custom Drum Machine Sound ROMs

May 24, 2006 by 10 Comments

alesis hr-16

The Alesis HR-16 was an inexpensive, easy-to-use MIDI drum machine from the early ’90s. [Burnkit2600] had a lot of experience circuit bending the HR-16 and decided to burn some custom sound ROMs for it. The HR-16 has two 32-pin ROMs that are conveniently socketed. He pulled the chips and dumped the image using an EPROM reader/writer. The ROM only contains sound samples, so you can open it up in raw mode using a program like Sound Forge. The samples are separated by short negative regions. All you need to do is place your new samples between the pits and burn a new ROM. You can piggy back the chips using the chip enable line to add even more samples.

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CCFL Backlight Replaced With White LEDs

May 23, 2006 by 31 Comments

jornada backlight

[Jeroen Domburg], one of our favorite hackers, has posted how to replace a cold cathode based backlight with white LEDs. He had recently purchased an HP Jornada 680 on eBay and the backlight was looking very pinkish. The Jornada has a QWERTY keyboard, CF slot, PCMCIA slot and can run Linux. Sounds like a pretty decent mini-terminal (now that we posted it you won’t be able to find one cheap though). In the space where the backlight was he was able to place 14 white LEDs. To get the  40V necessary to drive the series he built a boost-converter using an ATTiny13. The new backlight is just as bright and uses a 1/3 less power than the original. Half the Jornada’s power was being used by the original backlight, so this mod should give a decent increase in battery life as well.

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