[Stephanie] beefed up the hardware on her Dingoo A320. She enjoyed the features that the A320 handheld gaming system offered, but wanted the 64mb of RAM available in its bigger brother, the A330. A comparison of the two led her to believe a swap might be possible and after sourcing a pair of replacement chips for $12.50 she took the plunge. Once the solder had cooled it was just a matter of flashing some different firmware to take advantage of the upgrade.
[Thanks Juan via Dingoonity]
If you’ve got some time to scour eBay and $500 sitting around you can build your own liquid nitrogen plant. [Ben Krasnow] figured it all out for you and estimates he can produce a liter of the stuff for around $1.15. The process depends on a membrane to separate nitrogen from the other materials in the air around us and a cryocooler to get the gas cold enough to condense into a liquid. Other than atmospheric air, you need to pump in electricity. About 9.6 kWh per liter… yikes! Is your human hair solar panel up to that?
Anyway, once you’re up and running you can make yourself some ice cream or possibly save the world from oily destruction.
[Thanks Chris]
This keyboard display has an RGB LED for each key that is addressable through the common stage lighting protocol, DMX. The project video, seen after the break, does a good job of walking us through the concept. By using a MIDI to DMX converter box [John] can show MIDI signals coming from a keyboard on the appropriate key of the display. By further monkeying with the firmware in the converter box he shows a plasma effect on the whole keyboard, making the corresponding light for each pressed key pop out in bright white. Jump to about 3:45 to hear and see “Sweet Child o’ Mine”.
This isn’t the first time [John’s] been caught with a slew of blinking lights. He helped create the giant LED Christmas tree that brightened up our holiday.
[Daniel Daigle] is developing a rotary display that uses persistence of vision to graph data. The hardware he used includes a spinning head from a VCR, some LEDs, and a timing circuit to display 360 degrees of data. His timing input uses a waveform so this will work with any application where you can generate a PWM signal.
Check out his videos after the break that demonstrate a graph with a single line and another with six display lines.
Building an LED flashlight is simple, right? Take a battery, connect it to an LED by way of a resistor. Alright wise guy, now make one that steps up the voltage for multiple LEDs and don’t use a boost-converter IC to do so.
[fede.tft] shares a flashlight built inside of a used glue stick case. It’s the perfect size for one AA battery (we’re always on the lookout for good battery cases), and a shape that we’re familiar with as a flashlight. The problem is that he wants two white LEDs but with just one AA cell he’s never going to have more that 1.5V available. He licked that problem, getting to 7.2V by designing his own step-up converter using one transistor, an inductor, and three passive components. To get the inductor he needs, a stock part is disassembled and rewound to suit. Maybe you just end up with a flashlight when all is said and done, but then again, the Sistine Chapel is just some paintings on a ceiling.
[Alex] had an old FM radio tuner card come his way. It used an ISA connector, a standard that went the way of the dodo in the mid-nineties. With the challenge of implementing an ISA-bus to configure the card he set out on his mission. What he came up with is a working radio using the ISA card and driven by a PIC 16F877. Join us after the break for schematic, code, and a few details. Continue reading “Resurrecting ISA Hardware”
