[Alberto] sent this along. [Jose Pino] put up a nice how-to on modifying a cheap quartz clock to be used as a 1Hz (1 second) pulse generator. I can think of a number of past projects where this would have been really friggin’ handy.
Tesla Powered Sauron’s Eye
[Peter] sent in his latest Tesla coil experiment. He calls it the “Eye of Sauron” effect. It was created by adding a rotating breakout to an already powerful Tesla coil. It isn’t quite the same as the old evil eye of Tolkien’s dreams, the picture is a 22 second exposure of two rotations of the 7 foot aluminum tube.
Build Your Own ECG Heart Monitor
Our own Hack-A-Day emeritus took some time out from his showgirl pursuits to pass this along. The ECG was built to pad a resume, but it doesn’t make it less useful. Be warned, too much power could stop your heart. If you build one, triple check everything before wiring yourself up. Basically, an electrical differential is generated by the contraction of muscles in the heart. This slight signal is amplified by an op-amp and sampled with an A/D converter.
DIY HD Antenna
It’s been a while since I’ve seen any new antenna hacks. On the lumenlab forums, [pitman2] started with a measurements from a commercial antenna and drew up a set of plans for making a decent antenna for OTA HDTV signals. Pictured is an antenna built by [squeeto] – it’s made from copper wire, synthetic building wood and cheap cooling racks. Thanks to [Protcron] for the tip.
Watercooled LED Backlit LCD
[john] mentioned this on the LCD LED backlight post. Given the date on the posts, I was surprised that we haven’t seen it before. He replaced the CCFL lamp with 32 1 watt luxeon LEDs mounted on a custom copper water cooling block. The result is bright enough to be sunlight viewable in his car.
Wii Laptop How-To (Part 2)
Part 2 of Ben Heck’s Wii laptop How-To is up. The first half is all about the little touches, wiring switches, extending connectors, etc. The second half delves into designing the actual unit. Some of the comment’s on Engadget seem to want a full bore step by step build, but fail to realize that he’s really giving them the gold. Very few designers give away their intermediate design steps – But I am reminded of some of the Star Wars movie extras…
PSP Downgrader For V3.03 Released
While I was on vacation, [Fanjita] and [Ditlew] released a downgrader for PSPs running v3.03 firmware. To get it to work, you’ll need an unpatched copy of the GTA:Liberty City Stories UMD. The hack should get you down to v1.5. It’s supposed to work on all current PSP hardware. Thanks to [wraggster], [Steve DiRaddo]. [Sean] submitted the same info [via noobz], but they don’t appear to have credited the authors. (Unless of course, the authors are part of noobz.)
