In honor of the 17 inch aircraft carrier of a laptop I ordered, I started looking for a backlit keyboard mod that might come close to the one on my powerbook. I found this mod that used fiber optic cable, a single 10,000mcd white LED, some epoxy and simple current regulation to light it up. The original write up is here, and a great looking blue version as well. I’d like to see it this with a control circuit like this one.
Author: Will O'Brien805 Articles
Ultrasonic Range Finder
Tinmith Augmented Reality Backpack
I haven’t seen an augmented reality setup in a while. The Tinmith backpack consists of a VR helmet, with helmet mounted GPS tracking, firewire video camera, orientation tracking, glove based user interface and a belt back that contains the mobile computer and batteries. These systems have very interesting applications. From navigation to correcting information in real time to work around partial blindness.
Printer Networked Light Control
[Andy] sent in his ‘Network Something‘ hack. For his proof of concept, he used a parallel port printer network adapter to create a set of network controllable LEDs. The virtual printer was implemented with a set of shift registers and a set of nand gates. (and a power regulator). Old print servers can be had pretty cheap – my HP $8 on ebay. Definitely an interesting way to get inexpensive network control of your projects.
Note: We’ll be making some server changes today and tomorrow, so comments will be offline for a bit. They’ll be back.
DIY Wireless NES Controllers For Wii/Gamecube
[Mark] sent in his wireless classic nintendo controller project. He built a wireless NES and SNES controller to use with his Wii via the Gamecube port. He used off the shelf TX/RX hardware and used some PIC controllers to glue everything together. iPod batteries keep em powered and keep the weight down. He provides all the schematics and a walk through on constructing the SNES controller. The circuits are pretty simple, so it’s definitely repeatable. This is almost enough to get me to buy a Wii.
— video after the break.
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DIY RF Remote Control
I was plotting one of my future projects and found this diy RF remote control. I was struck by how simple the circuits are thanks to the micro-controller and RF modules. This is an older write up, and I know you can get newer modules from Spark Fun electronics, but when I was younger, RF controls always seemed to be the black magic of diy electronics.
Keybot – Serial Controllable Keyboard Interface
[john] sent in his uncles Keybot project. The device accepts input (a parallel port in this case) and generates standard keyboard output. It allows a computer to create its keyboard input for itself or another machine. Personally, I go for serial consoles, but it’s a good study of our old friend the keyboard. (If legos are more your thing, you could do something like this.)
