1953 Radio Includes Tubes, AM, FM, And MP3

September 7, 2010 by 16 Comments

This vintage radio can play AM, FM, and MP3, all with a classic sound. Inside you’ll find a new AM radio tube-amp, providing the functionality you’d expect from the device. The rest of it comes from a conglomeration of parts; an FM receiver board from another radio and an MP3 player with remote control and USB connector. The classic sound we mentioned above comes from an AM modulator. That’s right, the auxiliary audio boards aren’t connected directly, but are broadcast on the AM band so that your latest MC Lars album has the same sound quality as the traffic report.

Check out this similar project from last year that adds RDS to a vintage radio.

Snake Bot Climbs Trees

September 6, 2010 by 27 Comments

While you are out enjoying your Labor Day festivities, keep an eye out for robot snakes in the trees. The CMU robotics lab has built a snake bot named Uncle Sam that can climb trees and poles. As you can see in the video after the break, the bot seems to have no problem at all scaling a tree. It wraps itself around the tree, then rotates down the center of its entire body. Once it has reached the top, it can take in the scenery. Though it is a little creepy looking, at least it isn’t in the water.

Continue reading “Snake Bot Climbs Trees” →

Self Playing Bayan Built Nearly 22 Years Ago

September 5, 2010 by 57 Comments

The year is 1988, where a Russian engineer [Vladimir Demin] has combined a Bayan, or button accordion, with several (we lost count at about 96) solenoids. If that alone doesn’t blow your mind the computer, also hand built by [Vladimir], controls the whole process leaving the operator to only work the bellows. Putting truth to the fact in Soviet Russia, accordion plays you. We wish we could find some more information about the instrument, but curse our inability to read Russian. Alas check after the break for a shorter version of the video in the link above.

Related: Electronic accordion doesn’t compare.

Continue reading “Self Playing Bayan Built Nearly 22 Years Ago” →

Solid Ice Beer Caddy

September 5, 2010 by 31 Comments

brrrrr

[Rob] has made an astounding contribution in the effort to keep our libations chilled. Not content with merely refrigerating his cold ones, or even putting them in a cooler full of ice, he has built a beer caddy out of solid ice. Though it may look simple initially, you can see from his writeup that it actually took quite a few itterations to get it to freeze correctly, and then actually survive the process of removing the bottle placeholders. Ultimately, he found that glass bottles full of sand work best and you have to freeze the caddy in layers. Though he calls himself an impatient person, we’ve seen people who insisted on having their cold ones made frigid faster. You can see a video of the ice caddy after the break.

Continue reading “Solid Ice Beer Caddy” →

Binary Calculator

September 4, 2010 by 20 Comments

oooh, love those blue LEDs

[Syst3mX] emailed us about his Binary Calculator earlier this week and it almost slipped into the depths of our inbox. Luckily We noticed it in there today and thought we’d share.

He wanted to be able to calculate binary values without having to jump through hoops or boot up his computer, so he built his own binary calculator. For the brains, he chose an ATTiny2313. He can do basic operations like NOT, AND, OR, XOR, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and modulo. It isn’t too bad looking either. You can catch a video of it in action after the break.

Continue reading “Binary Calculator” →

Shovel…guitar?

September 4, 2010 by 53 Comments

We didn’t believe this hack at all when we saw it, or rather heard it. Surly a guitar made out of a shovel couldn’t sound decent. But the video (after the jump, skip to 2:40 for the jam) to our untrained ears sounded pretty rad. Could be the supremely well done wood work, proper use of tools, high tech pickups, or maybe Russian magic, we don’t know.

In fact, if you continue the video it doesn’t stop there. The creators also made a 2 string bass and a few other instruments from shovels. Do I smell a new shovel hero?

Related: Guitars made out of things that should not be guitars.

[Thanks Paul]

Continue reading “Shovel…guitar?” →

C Sharp Development 101 – A Tutorial Series

September 3, 2010 by 107 Comments

In this tutorial series we are going to look at C# Development using the Visual Studio 2010 Express editions.  This will take you from the basics of installing Visual Studio 2010 Express, to the Object Oriented Programming style associated with C# and other languages, dabble in some database access (Access & SQL Server Express) and finally, design a project that will pull all of our knowledge together into a final solution.