Author: Eliot

1332 Articles

High Altitude Linux Take 2

October 29, 2005 by 12 Comments

high altitude

[jcoxon] was inspired by the original Linux weather balloon project. His Pegasus 1 reached an altitude of 66,585ft and took over 600 pictures. The flight logging system is based on the Gumstix waysmall computer system. It captures data from the GPS receiver and controls two cameras. There are photos from both a downward facing camera and a side facing camera. Periodically the last three GPS entries are sent to Jame’s cellphone via SMS; this made recovering the payload a lot easier. There is already a second baloon planned.

Continue reading “High Altitude Linux Take 2” →

Mini Gas Turbine Motorcycle

October 28, 2005 by 18 Comments

minibike

Russ W. Moore of Bad Brothers Racing has an awesome project on his hands. The motorcycle frame is from a Yamaha YSR-50. Smaller than a standard street bike and larger than a pocket bike it comes with a 50cc engine and is street legal. The gas turbine is being constructed from a Cummins ST-50 usually found in large trucks. The documentation is pretty thorough and covers the build from the beginning. It’s still in progress, the exhaust and pumps still need to be mounted, possibly a starter too. The ECU will be a Basic Stamp II. See, you don’t need to be Jay Leno or have 150K to have your own jet bike.

[thanks arocketman]

Continue reading “Mini Gas Turbine Motorcycle” →

Hackaday Links

October 28, 2005 by 10 Comments

Yeah, I know Engadget is F@H now. I doesn’t bother me since we’re already sitting at #175 and are top 20 producers. If you need help troubleshooting your setup check out the unofficial Team Hack-A-Day Folding@HOME forum. [pocketlnt]

Speaking of Engadget: Did you see the low tech tea serving automata? You can build one entirely out of paper. [Manion]

Linux kernel 2.6.14 release impacts nearly every architecture. Lots of cool stuff has been merged like Centrino support and FUSE filesystem (think GmailFS). I’d be all over this, but still no Reiser4.

I hope someone gives [Peter] a proper rotary tool as a present. Maybe his future projects won’t look as gnarly as his CD player iPod disguise.

Modifying a Dell PowerEdge SC420 to accept a 16X PCI-E video card [h-tech]

[dcgrendel] wrote some dhtml to generate VMware .vmx config files.

Xbox-scene has some info on Xbox 360 security measures. [SilverX]

SnakeOil Labs has a couple how-tos up. Setting up FreeNX on Ubuntu and using Firefox with SwitchProxy.

[Alex Harris] has written up his experience installing Linux on his 2G iPod mini.

Live Knoppix CD for running a PPC and x86 distributed compiler (distcc) [Corey]

[John Bokma]’s experience making an XP Pro VM for the VMware player

[sle118] has an autoassociate script for WRT client mode.

Have a good weekend and we can always use good tips.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links” →

PRetec GPS Hack

October 26, 2005 by 5 Comments

pretec

[Barry Carter] had a Pretec compact flash GPS adapter for his PDA and really liked how it worked. The problem was it took up the CF slot so he wasn’t able to add any flash memory to the device to store larger maps. He opened up the device and discovered that it only had five wires attached to the compact flash portion. The lines came from an NMEA chip and he used a scope to figure out the port settings. All that was needed was an RS232 converter. With the new packaging he was able to plug the GPS portion into the PDA’s serial port and use a larger CF card for storage.

Continue reading “PRetec GPS Hack” →

Audio Output From A Serial Port

October 25, 2005 by 23 Comments

rs232

Yes, it is possible to get sound output from a serial port. Sure, it sounds terrible, but what did you expect. [markrages] ttyplay program first resamples the WAV file to the baud rate of the serial port. It then uses Sigma-Delta modulation to encode the analog signal into a binary bitstream. You should really try this out. The picture above is from when I was testing it out since it only took a minute to grab the parts and a second to compile. Mark says audio quality could be improved by using a higher baudrate. There is a lot of noise though. Somebody want to put together a simple RC filter/amplifier; I can actually think of a project this might be useful for. Read more about ttyplay here.

Continue reading “Audio Output From A Serial Port” →

IPod Video Recap

October 25, 2005 by 36 Comments

ipod

My 5G iPod arrived yesterday. We previously talked about automatically converting downloaded TV to iPod video. I had found [mike]’s comment odd since it said the iPod doesn’t support Videora’s H.264. Odd because I followed Videora’s conversion guide and that’s the setting they used. Well, it’s true. I was successful using the “SP/320×240/768KbpsStereo/128Kbps” setting Mike suggested. This issue has been acknowledged with the release of iPod Converter 0.81. I haven’t had a chance to test the new version which features more resolutions (not guaranteed to be usable). My Azureus setup seems be working even though the converter coughs up a .NET error every so often.

Continue reading “IPod Video Recap” →