[marco] sent in this video (scroll down) showing how to make a vacuum tube by hand. The page and captions are in french, but it’s pretty interesting to watch. A small spot welder, some fairly basic glass working tools and a vacuum generator are required, but the technology is definitely within reach for the dedicated hardware hacker.
Author: Will O'Brien805 Articles
Sound Input For Cheap Video Cams
I’ve been trying to find an excuse to pick up one of the HD Aiptek cams for a while now. [windowlikker] posted his simple pre-amp + external audio input mod for his Aiptek AHD videocam. Unfortunately, the mod is limited to mono input unless there’s an un-used stereo input on the encoder board.
Nixie Counter Clock
[lerneaen hydra] sent in his version of the ubiquitous nixie clock. Rather than gut his counter for the tubes, he used an Atmel Mega88 to pulse the clock to display the time. Additionally, the LED matrix on the case outputs the time in binary. His past projects are worth checking out. He milled the case on his converted CNC mill, retrofitted an old CNC lathe and seems to enjoy putting supercaps in everything (including his clock).
SDI Mod Your DVD Player
I’m not usually into products, but I like this one. Remember this diy SDI DVD video out mod which lets you send high quality digital video over coax? Thanks to Pixel Magic, you can mod a variety of DVD players to add SDI thanks to the kit they’re offering. At a glance, bt.656 and bt.601 appear pretty similar, but the eval kit from the original only claims to be compatible with bt.601 while the Pixel Magic version is for bt.656.
PSP Internal Hard Drive Mod
[Robin] over at acidmods sent in this interesting PSP mod. [PvP] added an internal hard drive (with the exception of a mini-usb cable sticking out the top) to his PSP. The advantage? Laptop hard drives are dirt cheap while sony memory sticks are still pretty pricy. More details should be along soon, but [Robin] assures me that this means up to 200GB of storage is possible for the PSP.
Got Spam? Let Us Know
I’ve been getting a few sporadic reports of SPAM that’s supposedly from hackaday.com on it. It’s a bit surprising, considering that the only email we send out automatically consists of comment confirmation requests to prevent comment SPAM.
So do me a favor… if you’ve gotten any, send it along with the email headers so I can track down the source and destroy er make it stop.
Inexpensive MPG Modding
[basjoos] modded [via] the body of his ’92 Honda Civic – and managed to improve his fuel efficiency from 50-60MPG up to 95MPG for about $400. Even more interesting is the SuperMID (Translated) that he added to the car to monitor his fuel efficiency. It’s based on an ATMega8 that reads the CAN bus and displays realtime MPG information an a character LCD. The SuperMID is popular for Prius modders because the on-board display maxes out at a paultry 99MPG. If micro-controller’s aren’t your thing, [Atilla] put together his own CAN bus decoder and ported his code to a Zaurus SL-C700. He even added voice feedback notification for certain data events.
