I stumbled on [Carlos]’ blog while I was hunting for Arduino ideas. This simple IR detector caught my eye – not for the project, but for the project case. He stuffed his IR detector inside an old 9V battery case. The TSA probably won’t like it, but it’s a fantastic idea for those smaller projects.
Urban Sound Experience
[Christiane] sent in a project prepared at the University of Applied Sciences in Würzburg/Germany. The idea is to experience urban sounds at various heights in a variety of cities. As feet are detected on a step, the experience changes to simulate an increase in altitude. A pair of surround sound headphones, some proximity sensors, an Arduino and instantaudio make everything work.
Simple Digital Camera Spectroscope
[JC Doré] sent in this [english] interesting optics hack. The rubber grips are made from an old mouse pad, the springs for the clip were salvaged from zip drive floppy discs. A pair of old photo slide frames sandwich a diffraction grating slide. (Like this one) This simple mod allows the slide to be mounted to most cell phones, turning them into digital spectrometers.
Add On-board Light Metering To Your Nikon D40
Nikon didn’t build a light metering chip into the D40. That’s fine if you’re using one of their auto lenses with the on-board chip. [Matt] decided to add a sensor to his camera and try it out with his manual lenses. His writeup is a bit challenging to get through, but if you’re really into Nikons, you’ll make it. He had to tap into the ribbon cable inside the body, mount the extra hardware, and add an additional switch outside the body to allow the chip to be turned on and off. The extra sensor adds a bit of a step to taking the shot, but it’s the sort of thing that’ll become second nature pretty quickly.
Lego NXT Cnc Mill
[btopley] built his own micro mill out of Lego NXT parts. The construction details are a bit light, but it looks like a great way to try things out without all the actual machine work.
CNC Mini-lathe
Given my obsession of CNC projects, I’m surprised that we haven’t mentioned this project before. [Dave] put together an excellent site about his CNC converted mini-lathe. (The same on that I’ve got) He built a pretty simple stepper controller to drive it. Since the lathe only needed two axis motors, he drove the steppers with some mosfets that he triggered from a parallel port. The site has been around for a while, but I thought you guys would enjoy a classic hack like this one.
HackIt: New Uses For Old CRT Monitors
[atrain] wants to know if we’ve got any thoughts on things to do with old CRT displays instead of giving them away or recycling them. We’ve seen pic programmers and oscilloscope projects, but even I’m curious to see what you guys have to say.
So, got a better idea? Let’s hear it.
