I may hit my limit on DIY laptops soon, but [Ben Heck] has been extra quiet for a while. Now we know why. Just after the release of his PS3 laptop comes his Apple IIGS laptop. Thanks to [Ed] for the tip. It features original Apple hardware and even uses the original keyboard PC board. A CF drive adapter replaces the hard drive and a 15 inch screen shows off the true power of 8 bit computing.
DIY IMac Mini
[Phyro-Mane] sent in his home built iMac mini. He based it on an old laptop with an install of OSX86 XP with a mac theme. The forum is in German, but the photos in the thread speak for themselves.
Arduino + Nunchuck +espresso = Awesome
Remember the voltage detector that I mentioned a while back? [Tim] hasn’t put up quite enough info to make me happy, but definitely enough to make me jealous. He updated his NES controlled Silvia to become a Wii nunchuck controlled (via Arduino) Silvia. That said, his last couple of blog posts have me questioning just how much espresso he’s been drinking. Theoretically, he could actually program the Silvia to refuse shots to people who are too jittery.
Quick And Easy CNC Setup Tricks
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc-9gTFj-y4&hl=en]
I was considering a laser cross-hair for my mill and found this video of some great setup hacks that [Greolt] put on his mill. The video is pretty short, but I’ll fill you in just in case you don’t want to play/load it. A laser cross-hair is mounted at a known offset to align the X and Y axis. A PC board is wired to a sensor to zero in the Z axis. When the bit makes contact, the machine knows that it’s at 0 + the PCB thickness. A shuttle pro controller adds jog controls and a macro takes care of moving the bit to the zero that was measured with the laser cross-hair. You can find more details on his zero touch setup here.
Dual Core… Arduino?
[John Ryan] posted his dual core Arduino rig on the Arduino forums. These two ATMega168 chips share the same 16Mhz resonator and I2C bus – allowing them to run in semi-parallel. The uC’s don’t actually communicate with each other, but they run rather nicely as concurrent circuits. It’s a pretty interesting method of adding I/O pins to a project for a minimal cost.
DIY PC Gaming Gun
[rustlabs] put together an interesting looking gaming gun for FPS games. He wrote up his build and how to use a webcam to provide gun tracking for games like Half Life 2. He gutted a keyboard to provide the button interface, and infrared LEDs on the gun body are tracked by the cam. Surprisingly, no USB game pads were sacrificed in the build, just a USB keyboard and mouse.
Ben Heck’s PS3 Laptop
[Ben]’s been at it again. This time he’s whipped up a PS3 laptop. He built this one just for engadget… and there will be how-to’s on it, oh yes, there will. For now, you can wet your appetite for console modding with the picture gallery. It’s pretty big, but It’s actually thinner than the original console.
