I found [Stefan]’s work through his older, but interesting TinyProjector project. He opted to use multiple diodes in various configurations with rotating mirrors to create images. He’s built quite a few interesting projects over the years. The WeatherTank is pretty sweet.
Author: Will O'Brien805 Articles
How-to: Make Your Own XBox 360 Laptop (Part 3)
[Ben] finally got part 3 of his XBox 360 laptop how-to finished up. This is the final piece of the series. He spends it covering wiring up the ports, buttons, keyboard and final assembly. There are plenty of shops that handle special order laser cutting – so don’t begin to think that this sort of project is out of your class. If you’ve ever built a model car and can handle a soldering iron, you can definitely build one of these on your own.
I was just checking for this final piece this morning – but props to [Tony] for noticing it first.
Fonera SD Card
[Jkx] sent in his fonera SD card experiments. It looks similar to the wrt54g mod – bit banging the interface works, but it’ll be slow. I poked around [Jkx] site and found quite a few goodies. (We’ve noticed his He’s built a nice tube amp, but his push-pull tube amp looks very interesting. Oh, and his simple negative power supply could prove handy,
Forced Air Laptop Cooling
We’ve seen some exotic laptop cooling solutions before. This one caught my eye for one reason – I’ve got an e1705 myself. (Complete with chipping media button paint). It’s not the most stylish, but [WhiskeySix] combined some PVC pipe and an adjustable high flow fan to give his dell a major airflow upgrade. I’d like to see one built that mates to the exhaust ports on the rear. Sure, it’s not pretty, but he was able to increase his frame rate by 50%. Thanks to [Wimpinator] for the tip.
Serial Port Power Booster
This one(coral cache) is a bit of a head slapper, but I thought it might come in handy. Laptop (or usb) serial ports are pretty notorious for being stingy on power output. [Roberto] came up with a clever solution. He used a MAX205 (sort of a double+ MAX232) and a singe capacitor to convert the low power serial connection on his laptop to a TTL signal and back again to RS-232. The result is a simple dongle that needs 5v and gives you a high power serial port for those power hungry devices – like [Roberto]’s PIC programmer.
Aux Stereo Receiver Controls
[Bob van loosen] added a remote learning circuit made from a PIC 16F84A to his Onkyo receiver – which happens to have remote buttons and a ttl control link for external devices. The PIC listens to the remote link on the receiver. By grounding a pin, it will learn the next remote command that’s received. In this case, he uses it to swap the left/right front/rear signals to gain proper speaker orientation when he switches between his TV and Computer. This would make an entertaining external dongle if you combined it with a smoke generator…
Soldering Iron Indicator Mod
At first glance, [sprite_tm]s weller mod seemed a bit trivial. In reality, it’s like art with analog electronics. He wanted to add an indicator light for the heating element. To pull it off, he built a funky diode capacitor circuit to create a pseudo-regulated DC voltage, then used a zener diode, a potentiometer and a transistor to make a simple voltage switch that activates a transistor driven LED.
