It’s been a while since we’ve featured a hardware project and I thought this one looked pretty simple. It was originally intended as a Christmas ornament. If you follow the schematics and burn the provide source you’ll end up with an 8×8 animated display. Not really sure what your going to do with it after that, but a flashing sign is sure to clue in the general populace to your dorkitude.
[thanks camzmac]
shbazjinkens had originally linked to Dan’s workshop when commenting on the backyard aluminum foundry. Dan uses a lost foam technique for casting his parts: the foam burns out of the mold to be replaced by metal. To make the initial foam pieces he built this hot wire based foam cutting lathe (out of cast parts natch). Nice little specialized tool that you definitely wouldn’t find easily. Dan is also responsible for the hot air pencil we mentioned the other day. Needless to say, there is a lot of good stuff on his site so have a look around.
Reader Jay was so mesmerized by the original oil computer story that he had to try it out himself. He had other good reasons: producing an experience report in English and creating a case that didn’t look slap-dash. It turned out to be a partial success and definitely a lesson. First thing he discovered was how not to oil proof a hard drive. He does get the chance to use the phrase “rock out with my caulk out”; which only goes to show: if you mess with bad puns, you will get burned. The rig did drop the computer temp quite a bit and Jay’s got numbers to prove it. Within hours of completion the case developed a fatal crack and redistributed the oil to the floor. Better luck next time Jay. It has been a couple months since the first story so if you’ve completed a similar project feel free to post your pics and/or comments.
otherpower.com has a great write up on building and flying this 17 foot monster. The turbine features 25 pounds of magnets in the rotors and 16 pounds of copper wire in the stator. It’s a really interesting process going from bearing assembly, to coil mock-up, resin casting the rotors and stator, blade assembly and finally raising the tower. The result is a turbine that can stand up to winds over 60 mph and has been known to produce 3.8kW. It’s a good project and also fun to read because of all of the warnings about not severing your fingers with high powered magnets.
[thanks John Heylin]
There aren’t many people that want to spend money on a printer whose sole purpose is to print directly on a CD. I’m sure there are quite a few out there that have an extra inkjet printer laying around looking for something to do. Why not chop it up into a dedicated label printer? This tutorial shows how to modify an Epson 640 printer, but it should work on any printer with the same style feed. So, if you’ve got one, try and decipher the heavily watermarked images and have a go.
[thanks com]
The MegaSquirt electronic fuel injection system has a completely open design to allow for easy construction and tweaking. The project has been around for quite a while and has a well established user community with many success stories. The open design means you can construct a unique fuel injection system; You can combine high performance parts with OEM parts from various manufacturers because the device has been designed from the ground up to be flexible. The MegaSquirt is well documented and you’ll be fully aware of what you are getting yourself into before you take the plunge.
For some more auto fun check out the latest Packet Sniffers episode.
Here is a full conversion of a typewriter into a computer keyboard. There’s actually something more nefarious at work here. Since you can still use the typewriter normally after the mod, Erik has essentially made a typewriter keystroke logger. Okay, so that isn’t really a threat, but this is a nice project that tries to overcome the stress inducing on/off nature of modern keyboards. All it needs now is a buffer and some nixie tubes and we’d have the coolest word processor yet.
[thanks ron]
