Animatronic Stuffed Animals Stripped Bare

June 18, 2008 by 4 Comments


For those who have ever wondered what Chicken-Dancing Elmo’s mechanical parts look like without the fur and the chicken costume (and who among us hasn’t?), [Matt Kirkland] posted the photos above, along with several other animatronic, walking, talking and other mechanical stuffed toys stripped of all their fur and stuffing. These before and after shots were ostensibly taken for unspecified “research purposes,” but if you ask us, any research that takes a knife to Elmo is the most valid kind.

[via Kottke]

High Power LED Blinking Circuit

June 18, 2008 by 7 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNDu56oGNck]
Evil Mad Scientist Labs brings us this easy to make LED blinking circuit. The idea is to put a LED in series with a small blinking incandescent bulb from a string of Christmas lights. The bulb has an internal bimetallic strip that bends out of shape when it heats up, cutting the circuit. when it cools enough, it returns to its original shape and closes the circuit again, making the bulb and the LED turn on. Both lights have short period of sustained light when they are initially powered up since the bimetallic strip is still warming up.

The project uses a 5W blue LED, the aforementioned bulb, and a 6V battery pack loaded with 3 AAA batteries. The battery pack and the lights are all attached to a small section of perforated board. Duplicating this project should be easy and provide a very bright LED, but to make a 5W LED shine its brightest, a larger bulb and a heatsink will be necessary.

PIC Controller Cable Tracer

June 18, 2008 by 3 Comments


[Kevin Gorga] submitted this PIC controller based wire tracer to a project contest last year over at circuit cellar.A 125Khz signal is injected to the target cable and a pickup coil is used to detect the field and identify the wires location. You can grab the full project schematics and code here. The rest of the entries are pretty sweet, so be sure to check them out.

Hacking Firefox Menus

June 17, 2008 by 8 Comments


[Nick] sent in his quick hack for getting rid of extra menu options in Firefox 3, like the ever useless ‘Work Offline’ option. (OK, maybe modem lovers like it…) If you’re tired of seeing cluttered menu choices that you never use, [Nick]’s simple trick of editing the XML formatted XUL files in Firefox to clean things up. There’s some risk involved, but it’s nothing that a quick re-install can’t repair. The writeup includes a basic introduction to the XML tags, so you can probably do it. You can use a text editor right? (Just don’t forget to have the installer or a backup copy handy before you start playing around.)

Dash Express Now Twittering

June 17, 2008 by 6 Comments


Here’s a quick hack to satiate our appetite for location aware applications. The Dash Express is a GPS unit with cellular and WiFi radios so it can do two way communication. Out of the box it can download maps and traffic on the fly. A little while ago they opened up the API so the device could receive info from other web services and owners could give feedback, like reporting speed traps live. The handy hack embedded above publishes your location to Twitter; we would have preferred it hit an actual location service like Brightkite. This just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to possible applications. We wonder what the adoption rate of the Dash Express will be, since the iPhone also has a touchscreen, GPS, and of course a cellular connection.

We’ve got a Dash Express in the lab and it’s based on the OpenMoko design. What sort of tomfoolery would you like to see us do with it? What do you think the killer app for the Dash Express will be?

[via Gizmodo]

Eee PC 901 Teardown

June 17, 2008 by 5 Comments


The folks from bit-tech have done us a great service by tearing open the Eee PC 901. Under the keyboard is a large metal plate that acts as the processor’s heat sink. The 4GB SSD card is not soldered to the board this time around. There is some empty space labeled IDE3 and solder points that say 3GCard, which definitely deserve further investigation. The oddest thing they found was a button with no indication to its purpose. It looks like a good machine and we hope to see more Eee PC hacks in the future.

[via Engadget]

World’s Oldest Computer Music Unveiled

June 17, 2008 by 5 Comments


Fans of music made with obsolete technology are in for a treat: recordings of a Ferranti Mark 1 computer playing Baa Baa Black Sheep and In the Mood were recently released, and they are thought to be the oldest recordings of computer generated music in existence.

The Ferranti Mark 1 is a commercial version of Manchester University’s SSEM computer (aka Baby), which preceded several more well known computers like UNIVAC and EDVAC. It was one of the first computers that didn’t require a great deal of hardware rewiring to perform different tasks, making it ideal for this sort of purpose. It is not known whether the program was written to play these songs only or for more diverse composition and playback, but the author, [Chris Strachey] was known to be a friend of the legendary [Alan Turing]. The recording was released as part of the Manchester SSEM’s 60th anniversary celebration.