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.
O2 Sensor Simulator
[Bob Blick] built this simulator from a 555 and few other common parts. Just when I thought I’d seen all the uses for the 555. The oxygen sensor on a cars exhaust is used to determine how efficiently the fuel mixture is to an engine. These can be a real pain to replace, so it can be helpful to fake the signal to the ECU.
DIY XBox 360 VGA Out
Ben Heck put up his latest How-To on Engadget today. [I got the night off yesterday] He points out that MS was kind enough to leave all the pins in the xbox video connector, so we can add our own VGA port and get some real Hi-Resolution out of it.
[yes, today’s hack will be up later. ]
XBox HD-DVD-ROM On Mac And PC
HD-DVD drives are getting closer, but aren’t terribly easy to come buy – yet. [Dan] over at uneasy silence let us know that he cracked open an XBox 360 HD DVD Drive and plugged it into a windows box and a mac. With a light application of some drivers, they got the drive working pretty easily – the snag? You’ll need a mini-ata adapter if you want to mount it internally. (And there’s apparently no HD-DVD software support for mac… yet.)
[you can just use it as a USB drive.]
Podcast 7
Here’s podcast 7. This is a short review of the last week or so’s favorite hacks. Audacity crashed out after my first recording, so I used Garageband this time – the bonus: you get each hacks images along with the audio. The rss feed is here.
[Yes, I started to recover the files, but it was easier to re-record]
Make A Badass CNC Mill
Ben Heck and I got into converting a mill to be a CNC machine during our podcast interview. Today I found a pair of great write ups at balbots on modding the Harbor Freight mini mill that I mentioned. Part 1 get into all the details of converting the mill to use stepper motors, and adding a cooling system. Part 2 covers upgrading to DC servo motors and replacing the gears with a belt drive system.
Bad Boy Charger
This is one of those hacks that scares me a little bit. The ‘Bad Boy’ charger was created by Tom Martin to charge EV battery packs. [Pictured is one built by Mike Chancy] You can find the schematic under austinev’s tech files. This thing is a bare minimum power supply – it’ll deliver loads of essentially unregulated power into a set of batteries. If you check out the circuit, you’ll see just how scary this thing really is, but according to its users, it works.
