[Mike] sent in this dell Axim hack. Sure, the Axim is just a handheld, but it’s capable of so much more. [afarre] built a sweet axim jacket. This is version 1, but it features VGA out, rs-232, power, a USB hub and an audio preamp. Version 2 looks pretty good.
Paintball Minigun
Every so I often I Google “paintball minigun“. This time it actually turned up something good. Special effects builder Rick Galinson has been working on a… wait for it… paintball minigun (cache). There is a video of a dry fire run on his site. He’s apparently having trouble with the triggers; I just want to know how he plans on loading it.
Rick has a lot of other cool projects. He’s got a cool two arm minigun prop (cache) (looks like Monev the Gale), A remote controlled submarine (cache), and a really cool telemetry suit (cache) for collecting upper body movement data.
For completeness’ sake you can check out Monty’s Miniguns for information on other paintball miniguns and miniguns in general.
Mp3 Flash Recovery
[Bart] sent in his efforts to recover the flash data on a mysterious mp3 player he found laying about. He successfully built an interface using a AVR/ATmega setup to get access to the data. This could be a viable way to recover data from broken thumbdrives – but it’s probably easier to swap the flash chip onto another drive. The Chipquik stuff sounds interesting – cold SMD chip desoldering. Given the cost, I’m not sure just how cost effective it is compared to buying a rework station.
[If you haven’t already, check out the Hackaday Design Challenge Fabienne’s nano is one prize and I’ll be announcing more prizes as soon as I’ve got them in hand.]
DIY Wacom Cintiq
In case you haven’t caught it already, check out this DIY Wacom Cintiq – AKA Wacom pad LCD tablet. Drew Northcott built his own for a couple hundred in parts. It’s a cool hack – I figured I better put up an extra post before I my inbox gets filled with it. Thanks for the tips guys!
Design Challenge Mini-extra
Check out our new contest – design a business card PC board.
[Windell] sent in his tv-b-gone retro mod. [I want one that changes all the TVs to the SciFi channel.] He points out the ultra tv-b-gone as well.
[pillowcase] sent in his iTunes shower button – skip songs mid shampoo.
We heard about making a portable high power laser from a DVD burner laser yesterday, but the bandwidth was exceeded before we got there. It’s back up, for now.
[Mitch] let us know that a few days ago+ we appeared on TV in a lock bumping ad on Channel 6 WOWT News in Nebraska. Anyone else seen this?
Don’t forget that this site is driven by tips, so keep us in mind when you whip out the soldering iron.
Hackaday Design Challenge – Yes, A Contest!
So, you guys want to show off your skills? We’re giving you the chance. [If you don’t like it, blame Limor – she came up with the original idea]
The Challenge:
Design our next give-away: a business card sized PC Board. We’re not telling you what to make the circuit do, just make it something handy for hacking. Me, I think a PIC programmer/proto board would be handy.
The board must have:
- The Hackaday logo
- business card dimensions (90mm x 55mm)
- reasonably easy to construct
- A useful circuit (programmer, interface, whatever.)
- Assembly instructions
- Parts list
Through hole components are a good idea (Of course, if you can do it with SMD cheaper, and keep it easy to build… Surprise us) Maybe we could surface mount the CPU before we give them away, or we might put together parts kits, but it depends on the winning design(s).
You can put whatever circuit you like on it. PIC
programmer, JTAG interface, flux capacitor… but it has to work!
We want to have a board house make these up for us, so we’ll need the design in a format we can work with. We suggest EAGLE. It’s free and runs on just about everything. (But it limits you to two layers – which should be plenty)
Some hints to help you get the winning design:
Bonus for extra functionality
Clever incorporation of our logo
Completeness – include solder mask, drill info, everything we need to make the board.
The Prizes:
Fabienne is putting up her black 2gb iPod nano engraved with “hackaday.com” “one fresh hack each day” – It’s been used a bit, and opened up a few times so it’s got some scratches, but hasn’t been modded… yet.
We’ll send you some of the boards of course. I’ve got more good stuff in the works, and I’ll announce more prizes as we get them confirmed.
Submissions: When you’ve got your design ready, Put it online and let us know about it on the tip line. (Or send in a tip and we’ll tell you where to email it if you don’t have anywhere to host it.)
The Deadline: December 25th. Plenty of time to get your design cranked out. Everyone needs a winter break, but We’ll try to have a winner chosen within a week or two of the deadline.
Zune Gutted
bunnie has gotten his hands on a Zune and done the best thing you could possibly do with one: tear it apart. Here’s a HiRes picture of the board. bunnie does note that the Freescale iMX31L is full of potential.
