[Wolf] sent in this site a while back, and I thought that this frequency meter how-to looked pretty useful. It’s based on an Atmel AT89C52 and a gutted multi-meter. The circuit isn’t too bad. (The worst of it has to be all the display lines.) The Atmel grabs the signal to be measured and drives the display, so the parts count is pretty low.
Author: Will O'Brien805 Articles
Wiimote Car Accelerometer
This one’s pretty simple, but anyone who’s ever spent time tweaking an engine will appreciate it. [Kevin]’s been using a wiimote to measure the acceleration of his car. He put together a script to dump the accelerometer output to a CSV file, then graphed it with Excel. He notes that the accelerometer output isn’t that precise, but it’s good enough to give you feedback on your mods.
Switchmode Power Supply Hacking (power Your Laser)
[Mike] wanted a better power supply for his argon laser, so he modded some switchmode power supplies. With a few tweaks, he had a few adjustable voltage outputs and a nice solid supply of electrons for his laser projects. If you need a lab quality adjustable power supply for your projects, this is a nice way to get it on the cheap. (He’s in the UK, but the same ideas should apply to us models.
Mecha Turbo Crazy Coffee Roaster
I’m a wee bit of a coffee geek. This roaster was built by [farmroast]. It’s a highly modified of version of the roaster that I’ve been using for the last year or so. A convection oven up top provides the primary heat source, while the beans are spun around in the roast chamber below. A pair of thermocouples let you know what’s going on inside the chamber. When the roast is done, pop the top, dump the beans into the drawer, and a fan mounted below cools them to room temperature in about a minute. It was put up for a home roaster building contest – You might be interested in the other entries.
I hope the coffee wars at defcon are this interesting.
Emailing Typewriter
This innocent typewriter was modded to act as a keyboard and typewriter. The idea is to remove the computer interface from the process, giving a user the ability to interact via email but avoid computer frustrations. (The idea came from the creators mothers frustration with computers) Thanks to [BBCmicro] for sending it it.
XBox 360 Hacking 101 Extra
[BlueMoon] let me know about a translation of an interview posted over at xbox-scene. The original dutch version is here. It’s a very good overview of XBox 360 security and the exploits needed to take advantage of the hardware.
If you dig EVs, you might want to check out my latest experiment. I’ll be building a EV, but each step of the process will be defined by reader votes. It’s $1/vote, with the idea that the votes will pay for the project.
[Jay] sent in a little info on streaming audio and sometimes video to your Wii.
[Robert] sent in his research on building and testing diy GSM antennas for extending rage range.
GardenMon(itoring Project)
[Ken_S] sent in his GardenMon (coral cache) project. It’s a set of light, humidity, moisture and temperature probes that monitor the surface and below ground conditions in his garden. He’s using several picaxe micro controllers to take readings with a variety of off the shelf and commercial sensors. Once he started collecting the data, he added a programmable servo controlled watering valve with a configuration that he tweaks accordingly.
The site is on geocities, so use the cache.
I had a few requests, and this fits, so I added a home hacks category.
