I’ll keep this short and sweet. Fabienne, Eliot and I unanimously chose [Nuxie1]’s entry as the winner. His board is a nicely done USB PIC prototyping board. [Nuxie1] gets some sweet prizes and some bragging rights. Congratulations [Nuxie1]!
It seems that our tips line has been screwed up for the last week or so. If you’ve got something good, don’t be afraid to re-submit it.
Meet the DIY Dvorak keyboard. I’m feeling nostalgic this week, and I was surprised that we’ve never mentioned this simple, but useful hack. Heresy history lesson: the qwerty keyboard was created to slow down typing – because old typewriters jammed too easily. The Dvorak keyboard is more efficient because the letters that are most often used are positioned closer to the fingers natural position. [Anders] swapped the keys on his Swedish thinkpad, and even customized the map a bit further to his own taste.
Somehow, [acidx] knew that I coveted a libretto for years. He sent in his writeup on modding his Libretto 50ct to be a bit more useful. The mods are pretty basic, he overclocked it to 133Mhz and added a ps/2 port. The tweaks keep the well aged libretto a usable platform.
Pssst. wanna see your hack on Hack-A-Day? Use the tips line!
Here’s the final batch of entries we received and considered for the Design Challenge.
[Chris] sent in a stereo amplifier (watch out for pop-ups) designed for iPods (or similar) using LM386 amps and a minimal parts count.
[Fabian] submitted this excellent tube amp. It’s based on the ECC83/12AX7 tube, and runs off a mere 12-14VAC.
[Edgar] sent in this combination PIC/AVR programmer.
Finally, we’ve got a simple PIC/EEPROM programmer by [Ian]. (view the unzipped version here)
According to Apple, all of their current machines are compatible with their new 802.11n wireless hardware. The guys at MacBidouille wanted to know if they could get it functioning in their early rev macbook core duo. They ganged a new card from a MacPro and got busy.Things came out ridiculously easily, with a simple hardware swap. Considering that the pci connector is the same, I wonder if any portable with an airport extreme card could be upgraded (with an additional antenna)
We finally came to a decision about the winner of the Design Challenge! (But I’m not telling you until Friday.) Before the winner is announced, there are some more entries that deserve attention.
First, there’s [Henk]’s g-force meter. It’s based on an ATiny26 micro-controller, 30 LEDs to display the force and the ADXL103 accelerometer.
There’s an adaptation of the no parts pic programmer, by [Patrick].
[Evan] sent in his PIC prototyping board using the monster PIC18F4550.
I’ll have one more batch of entries later this week, and the winner will be announced on Friday. Yes really. I’m going to give it a few days just to make sure that all of our DNS issues have cleared up.
We don’t normally chase after commercial products, but when I ran across this guys work, I was impressed. My favorite has to be this solar powered GPS logger. It logs your trek to a SD card and it’s oh so tiny. Other notable projects include a li-poly battery backpack for charging USB devices. (Li-Poly batteries require some specialized charging)
