[blip] let us know about this nice little project. The Alien DAC Project is basically a DIY USB sound card/interface. [Pictured is one built by cook on head-fi.org] It uses a TI PCM2702 at its core with some supporting chips for power regulation and virtual ground for the analog audio signal. It’s small and should do the job. If you’re really interesting in taking it to the next level, check out the DAC-3. It’s like the big mean older brother of the Alien DAC. That thing is rack mounted, has Optical, Coax and USB inputs.
[If you run across any more floating ads, let me know. They shouldn’t on the site, and we’re trying to take care of them.]
IPod Hd Adapter
Robert Brown sent in his iPod hd adapter. Sure, you could buy an Addonics 1.8″ toshiba to ide adapter for $15; but he didn’t mind soldering up the 50 wires to connect his drive to a USB IDE adapter. To finish it out, he put everything into an enclosure and added an eject button.
C64 Alpha Mod
David Terrill sent in his new c64 project. It’s almost an end-all c64 mod. He lopped off the back half of the case, added s-video, a piggybacked secondary sound chip, 1/4″ audio, stereo input, audio feedback, a serial port, DIN sync… and more. If you dig c64s or hardware bending, check out his write up.
Hackaday Extra
I spent 14 hours at airports today, after staying up all night. My internet access at Toorcon was bandwith starved, so I wanted to catch up a bit. I’ll try to highlight more Toorcon stuff later in the week.
[Clinton] and [bart] both sent in Clinton’s electric shock alarm clock. (Don’t even think about building one of these things, it could kill someone if you’re not careful.)
[capagotks] sent in his USB refitted hand crank LED flashlight.
I got this a few times, so here’s a simple work surface made from an old PC case. (I use self healing cutting mats.)
[Ian] presents us with a bunch of cell phone repair (and upgrade?) information. Let me know if you actually rebuild a broken phone. The most likely scenario would be LCD replacement.
[Jim] sent in these candy(sugar) powered rockets. sweet!
Finally, [Leigh Norton] in Essex (Yes, Essex.) has an HP pen plotter like the one used to make a vinyl cutter. Post if you want it and maybe he’ll give it to you.
Toorcon Hard Drive Data Recovery
Eliot and I caught Scott Moulton’s talk on Hacking Hard Drives for Data Recovery. You can catch his slides here – but most of the content was in the talk. It was a great walk through of hard drive technology. Some interesting points: 85% of the time, software recovery is successful. 10% of the time, replacing the controller board succeeds. So, 95% of the time you can probably recover your data fairly easily.
Scott showed off a peltier enhanced drive sled for keeping a drive cooled for optimal operation/recovery conditions. He even got into replacing drive heads. If you’ve ever gutted a drive, you’ll know how fragile those heads are. You can actually fold a postit note to keep the heads apart and tranfer an arm with heads from a donor drive to get your drive working again. The difficulty of the operations seem to increase exponentially as the number of platters increases.
Newton Web Server
[Ian] sent in this Newton web server. [The page is served by the newton, I doubt it’ll handle our load] Apparently there’s still a good following for the handy message pads. (I really wanted a 120 when they came out) This one’s running newton personal data sharing to deliver its web interface.
Toorcon Nostalgia Talk
I made it to the nostalgia panel on saturday night. It was pretty amusing. Captain Crunch joined the panel along with Dan, dnm, grey and Damon. It was a bit of a popcorn affair puncuated by ascii art(pr0n), and assembly code. Captain Crunch was great. I know he was at Defcon, but I’ve been out of the cons for a while, so it was my first chance to hear him. He talked about how he got into phreaking, his first blue box and the blind kids that inspired his phone line adventures. (Today he’s got a $10 home phone line with an asterix box combined with voipstunt connection that gives him free calls legally.) A couple highlights from Captain Crunch: He wrote a little program and left it for Woz . The next day Steve was really ticked off at him. Woz used his program to set the apple phone board to call Jobs house over and over again. He scored the CIA crisis number that seemed to get Nixon on the line. He traded it and the group that he gave it to called up ‘Olympus’ and reported that they were out of toilet paper. Damon pulled out an apple scripted apple ][e emulator.
