[everett] sent in his final project for his mechanisms class. In an attempt to create his own bolt on X gene, he built a wrist mounted hand activated flame thrower: The Pyro System. The wrist mount has an igniter and a nozzle for dispersing fuel. When he flexes his hand back, a switch actuates a servo on the fuel and fires the igniter. Quick disclaimer: Don’t try replicating this one! If you want to skip the movie clip, skip 33 seconds into the video.
ToorCon Seattle 2008: Lightning Talks
The second ToorCon Seattle got off to a quick start last Friday with a round of Lightning Talks at the Public Nerd Area. Each talk was limited to 5 minutes and covered a broad range of topics. Some talks were just supplying a chunk of information while others were a call to action for personal projects. Here are a few of the talks that we found interesting.
Modchip Your XBox 360 Controller
[CyberPyrot] and [l0rdnic0] released their spitfire mod on acidmods for XBox 360 controllers. It involves some fine wiring, but a relatively low parts count. The heart of the mod is a PIC16F84A, a crystal for the clock and a few passive parts. It took me a little while to find it, but the code for the pic hiding under the parts list. For a lengthy demo of the mod in action, you can check out this video.
Related: Xbox 360 Hacks, Xbox Hacks
Autonomous Catamaran
[Gabriel] put together an impressive writeup of his autonomous catamaran, Atlantis(PDF). It was certainly done as an academic project, but there’s a thorough explanation of the math logic behind the control systems. The heart of the boat was a waterproofed Pentium laptop with a CAN bus parallel interface used to talk to everything on-board. Sensors included GPS, wind, hull speed and rudder angle. In case the site can’t handle the load, I’ve mirrored the 1.4MB PDF here.
Tiller Autopilot For Small Sailboats
[Dennis] sent in the glider that [Art] built, but I had to feature his dinghy autopilot. It runs on solar power, takes GPS data via serial and maintains the heading using a servo motor to drive the line. It’s an excellent solution for the hardware hacking boater.
DIY Midi Pedalboard
[Nick] sent in this sweet midi pedal organ. [Seffan] modded an old set of organ pedals with the cheapest midi keyboard he could find. Each pedal was equipped with a switch mechanism, so it was just a matter of patience and wiring. To come up with enough wire for the job, he sacrificed some IDE cables. If you’ve ever played with some organ pedals, you know that these things can really add another dimension to music – especially with the newly added MIDI interface.
Sony XEL-1 OLED Teardown
[bunnie] just happened to be at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose on exactly the right day to witness the live teardown of a Sony XEL-1 OLED TV. The XEL-1 is Sony’s flagship OLED panel that’s only 3mm thick… and $2500 for just an 11-inch screen. [bunnie] was able to take quite a few shots of the components as they were passed around. He pointed out a few interesting bits about the construction. There seems to be quite a bit of thermal material on the display to prevent “avalanche thermal failures” (which I’m guessing doesn’t look as cool as it sounds). OLED displays are completely transparent and their legendary contrast ratio is just a result of the dark backing material. The mainboard seems to be a bit of overkill for this TV and [bunnie] concludes that it’s just the standard image engine architecture from Sony’s Bravia line put into a smaller package.
