Kevin Zeits sent in his diy Nikon d200 gps cable and hot shoe gps mount.
Nikon sells it for $150, but has a 3 to 6 month eta. Ok, it’s really just a ttl to rs-232 converter with proprietary connectors – but I love tagging photos with gps info. Now if only I could do this for my canon rebel xt. (It would take a firmware hack at the minimum) If you’re not blessed with a d200, check out gpsphotolinker.
The guys at invent geek posted their latest project. They
Shane brennan sent in his groups final CE/EE senior design project. fre3space is an ir, ultrasonic 3d mouse. Three towers take ultrasonic sound measurements to calculate the position of the mouse. button clicks are transmitted in ir. A fpga developers kit ties it all together and provides the usb interface. a simple opengl application demonstrates the 3d capabilities of the system (vs 2d of the desktop variety).
SDI (Serial Digital Interface) is a digital video over coax standard with up to 540Mbs of bandwidth. For now it’s only found on high-end a/v hardware. Retired broadcast engineer Robert Cobler hacked a SDI interface into his his satellite reciever and Danny Mavromatis did his DVD changer for the ultimate in digital video quality. Robert built the ‘Poor Mans SDI‘ to show that SDI doesn’t need to be expensive. He interfaced a National CLC020 to the Bt865 video chip and added some logic hardware to impliment the required SAV/EAV signals. If you’ve got the right video chip(with the right clock), you can use the evaluation kit to make your own. Check out danny’s blog entry for a beautiful screen capture.
[Update: The DVD mod is by Danny Mavromatis – Robert wrote up the satellite mod on AVSforum – Thanks Scott]
VW has been shipping their cars to the US with small solar panels inside to keep the batteries from going dead during shipment. Dick Streefland picked one up and added a small monitor circuit to monitor and charge his battery. Batwatch is based on the Atmel ATtiny13V and measures the voltage on two sides of a resister to determine the voltage of the battery while the solar panel is charging the system.
Most ccd hacks today are based around modding webcams. Back in 2000, amateur astronomer ‘astroturtle’ built his own water cooled CCD camera. It was based on the long discontinued Texas Instruments TC245 CCD chip. Water cooling enhanced by a peltier junction is neccesary just to keep the chip cool enough during operation. The result? 378×242 pixels and a 2 second refresh rate.
I’ve been known to modify an innocent kitchen appliance or two, but Derek Bradford has me beat. Derek is on the third iteration of his ‘uglyroast‘ coffee roaster. Since the nearest Home Depot is a continent away, he’s limited to simple parts and tools. The beans are heated with a gas stove. The second version used an electric fan and a camp stove. The latest one has a dedicated motor and sits over a gas range.
