Hack-a-day favorite [Sprite_tm] sent in another nice GP2X hack. He knew he had some space from his previous USB port adventure. He pulled a small reciever from a cheap SDIO GPS card and added it to his GP2x. He rounded it out with an ATTiny13 that’s used to power up the GPS only after it recieves a magic string from the onboard serial port.
John Sullivan’s projector suffered some unplanned damage. The mirror inside the projector that reflects light from the bulb was broken, rendering the unit useless. The mirror was an odd shape, so he cut up a platter from a sacrificial hard drive and made a replacement. If you’re looking for other projects for those old drives, I dug up a few. The hd motor anomemeter is interesting. The brushless motor can be used to generate AC current to calculate the speed.
[Hopefully comments will be back this week. I’ll get into the details when it’s fixed.]
Dive gear has become so commercialized that DIY diving equipment is almost frowned upon. The dive light group that lives on msn is full of design ideas and how-to’s for building some custom dive gear. My favorite is the HID cannister dive light. The light head is made from a maglite flashlight. Either a HID lamp/ballast made for ATVs or a cheap MR16 halogen is used. The batteries are contained in a seperate waterproof cannister. (Yes, I love to dive. I’ll be building some of these as soon as I buy a mini-lathe.)
[wraggster] was first to send in the latest news on PSP hacking. Yesterday a firmware downgrader was released to take PSPs running v2.71 down to the homebrew friendly v1.5 firmware. The authors took advantage of a tiff expolit to get it working and apparently bricked four PSPs in the process. Looks like it’s working, but there are plenty of caveats to read up on before giving it a shot.
Ian wrote a nice instructables how-to on building a USB thermometer using a PIC 18F2550. It’s surface mount, but that’s doable with a very fine tip and all parts are available through-hole. The controller provides all the I/O needed for the USB interface and the data collection. It looks like a great intro for building USB interfaces to your projects. He also wrote up how to syndicate the data for the web.
Dylan Field sent us our first Chumby hack tip. Oh, and I got a new daughter too. (So I’m a little tired.)
Adapters to mount older fd mount canon lenses onto the newer eos cameras have been around for a while. There are some problems to solve. Because of the focal length, the fd lens could no longer focus to inifity and lose brightness(an f-stop). Rodolfo Novak modded his canon 55mm f1.2 fd lens for the eos mount by removing some vital parts(the attachment ring and the aperture ring). ?Now that the lens was closer, both infinite focus and the f-stop are back. He’s a bit short on the details, but it becomes clear if you look at an unmodified lens. Of course, to get the focus indicator working on a digital eos like my 350d, you need to add an af lens emulator circuit. If you don’t care about infinite focus, you could go a less invasive adapter.
Project parts aren’t cheap. Scrounging them from old hardware presents some challenges. Derek Anderson pointed us to this short but sweet how-to on hot-air desoldering using a heat gun from Home Depot. Looks like a great way to fill your parts bins.
