Author: Eliot

1332 Articles

Hard Drive Oscilloscope

April 25, 2006 by 20 Comments

hard drive scope

[hackgadgets.com is back up… maybe]

[Alan] put together a list of the Top 5 Dead Hard Drive Projects. He suggested we post about the hard drive laser oscilloscope, since he couldn’t find the project anywhere else. I actually saw a similar project during dorkbot-sf‘s presentation at Maker Faire. A laser is mounted to the drive case. The beam is bounced off of a mirror connected to the read/write head. He’s got a video of it in action on his site. Have a look at the other hard drive projects as well.

Scratch Built RC Helicopter

April 24, 2006 by 21 Comments

rc helicopter

Ben Hui had been planning on purchasing an RC helicopter, but with a little more reading he was determined to build his own (cache). Most of the bracketry is built out of the fiber board base used for PCBS. He has details of how he constructed the swashplate, rotor head, tail rotor, and how to make your own blades. He eventually modified a brushless CDROM motor to drive the main rotor.

[thanks Jan]

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The Woz Playing Segway Polo

April 24, 2006 by 14 Comments

I admit it. Most the weekend I was making quips about the Segway polo guys like, “Those guys look like walking would do them some good, especially that one.” Well, Will and I finally put two and two together and realized that “that one” was Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple. He is feared on the polo ground because he has got at least three backups with him and doesn’t mind breaking one.

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MF2006: Human Powered Ferris Wheel

April 23, 2006 by 5 Comments

human powered ferris wheel

There is a set of bike pedals attached to each seat. The chain on each one drives a sprocket attached to the chair’s pivot point. Spinning the pedals tilts the chair and the entire frame reacts by rotating. They only had one set of pedals attached, but it was more than enough to spin the wheel at a pretty good clip. It did look like some damping on the chair pivots would help, since the chairs would swing pretty wildly. I’m sure adding two more chairs would help as well.

A Cyclecide creation [thanks Sasha]

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Building IR Peripherals For The PSP

April 23, 2006 by 12 Comments

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C.K. has always been the goto guy around here when it comes to testing out new PSP hacks. Firstly because he was writing a PSP Hacks book and had plenty of hardware laying around; Secondly because it kept me from having to field questions in the excessively long firmware threads. The book has been published and O’Reilly has posted some sample chapters. Thomas Novotny wrote this chapter on interfacing the PSP with peripherals over IR (PDF). It’s similar to our previous entry, but has better documentation and doesn’t assume that you are experienced with microcontrollers.

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