Projectors have long been a favorite toy of hardware hackers. From reactive displays to cheap home theater, there are plenty of reasons to play with photons. Seeing some cheap projector repair put us in the mood to cover some of our favorite projector projects – check em out after the break.
Author: Will O'Brien805 Articles
Cheap Projector Repair
[Ryan] sent in this writeup on some DIY projector repair. The write-up is a little hard to follow, but maybe it’ll inspire some future projector landfill saves. [Dissident] replaced the light bulb and ballast in an older DLP projector with some salvaged MR-16 hardware from an even older over head projector. The main trick required was to bridge the trigger leads that tell the projector that the bulb is on and working.
FPGA Projects Roundup
FPGA’s have become especially useful to the hacker community of late. Once upon a time, these lovely pieces of dedicated hardware were fabled to only be within reach of deep pocketed graphics card producers working to up their shader and vertex counts. Today they’re often found in the bowels of high end network gear. As reprogrammable arrays of logic gates, FPGAs represent a happy middle ground between general purpose CPUs and dedicated silicon. After the break, we’ll recount some of the more interesting FPGA projects we’ve seen, like the open source graphics card we featured yesterday.
Modular Reconfigurable On The Fly Robot Demo
[Erik] Sent in this modular robot video. It’s not as mentally disturbing as the snake robots we featured before, but it’s still pretty cool. It looks like it’s using M-TRAN modules. Details are completely lacking, so if you’ve got some, share ’em.
Bump Key Experiments
[Barry] took one of his blog readers comments to heart and started wondering just what happens when you bump a lock. As suggested, he made a cut away lock core and started experimenting. [Barry] doesn’t have a high speed camera, so he tried some alternatives like filling the chambers with grease to indicate pin movement. Master Lock put together a nice video demo of lock bumping (in order to sell their new bump stop gear).
USB Microcontroller Dev/emulation Sticks
[nazerine] sent in [Emanuele]’s list of interesting USB micro-controller development tools. Some of them are surprisingly cheap for what you get. The wireless dev/emulator stick looks extra interesting for developing remote projects. (The purchase links are through the manufacturer – at first I thought he might be selling the things)
Voice Controlled Wheel Chair
[Amnon] sent in this demo of his groups voice controlled wheel chair. I couldn’t find any details, but sometimes just a demo is enough to find some new inspiration. They connected a hm2007 speech recognition kit to an Innovation FIRST controller board on an electric wheel chair chasis. Additional sensors detect stairs and other obstacles.
