Friday Night Extra

March 9, 2007 by 9 Comments


I’ll be busy with my soldering iron tonight, but I thought it was time for an extra.

[Joe] notes that if you’d like to put up some graffiti you probably won’t get arrested for, you might light projection bombing.

[Emil] noted that [mark] successfully upgraded his ipod mini to run an eight GB CF card. (He’d previously put a 4GB flash card in.

[XanTium] notes that several patches have been released for the Linux 2.6.20 kernel specifically to support XBox 360 hardware. A Linux loader is soon expected to be released to exploit the Hypervisor vulnerability.

[CtrlAltDefeat] pointed out an interesting DIY camera card to hard drive memory dump device.

[Bobby] sent in a teaser of his DIY bluetooth Sony MDR 300 headphones.

World Weather Umbrella

March 9, 2007 by 3 Comments


[Peter] brings us the oddest hack of the week. It’s a little esoteric, but interesting. This modified umbrella is used in conjunction with a giant world map outline. A camera takes note of the umbrella position and correlates the location. The user walks around and ‘experiences’ the weather in that location of the world. If you’d prefer to have everyone think you’re nuts, you could just interface it with your ipod.

Balancing One Wheel Scooter

March 8, 2007 by 54 Comments


Fresh off the tip line, [Ben] sent in his one wheeled balancing scooter. It’s a nice simple design – I just might have to build one myself. The steel frame surrounds a pair of 12V 12Ah SLA batteries, a 400w 24v DC motor, one of the ever handy OSMC motor controllers, rate gyro, accelerometer and a PIC 16F876A. I love the entire concept! (For some reason, I’m thinking it needs a brake light on the rear…

Check out the video after the cut. He walks through the hardware at the end.

By the way, Eliot and I’ll be at Shmoocon in a couple of weeks. We won’t have boards from the Design Challenge yet, but we should have something to give away to people who find us there.

Continue reading “Balancing One Wheel Scooter” →

DIY ‘midi’ Footpedal

March 6, 2007 by 18 Comments


[forrest] passed along this diy foot-pedal ‘midi’ controller. It’s a good re-use of hardware, but not a true midi controller. The pcb was gutted from an old keyboard, and the pedals were scored from a mad 60 mile tour of the local radio shacks clearance bin. Since the pedals are simple momentary on switches, it was a matter of wiring them to the controller and using a laptop to generate signals via usb midi interface. Replace the keyboard pcb with a drum controller and you’d have an interesting stand alone solution.

Just so I could enjoy some extra crow, I managed to leave one other entry out of my published list of Design Challenge entries. [Jason] sent in this MEGA32 programmer/dev board. He kept it single sided, but you’ll need a parallel port to use it.