Over on the Ben Heck forums, moderator G-Force made his own Hack-A-Day T-shirt. I dunno guys, do we need to start selling them? In the past, our swag has been by give away only. Thanks [Marshall]
It’s been a couple of exhausting weeks since the deadline for the Design Challenge. I’m going to finish up going through the entries and we should have a winner sometime next week.
Laptops aren’t always the bomb/drool/mountain dew proof machines we wish they were. [TomTheGeek] was suffering from a loss of his I, 8 and K keys. Like a laptop Reaver, he sliced out the old keyboard and spliced in a compact USB keyboard. He likes the look, I’d probably whip up some acrylic spacers at the least and fill the exposed areas.
[Jason] sent in this nice palmtop C64 (cache) project based on a PSone screen. Notable hacks: PIC 16F88 to encode rs-232 to PS/2 keyboard output, Atari keychain joystick and a SD card slot (not functioning yet). The case was made of wood and laminated over with contact paper.
[Waggy] submitted this handy device for his entry. It uses several 556 timers to clock a driver chip that drives the mosfet output. If you’re not familiar with PWM – think of it as a six channel motor speed controller, but far more flexible. [Waggy] did a nice job writing up the details on the board – definitely a strong entry.
[Keith]’s cousin gave him a LCD with a noisy backlight. He decided to replace it with a series of high output LEDs. He sourced some locally in the form of cheap LED headlamps from an auto-parts store. The results look pretty good – and the write up contains this gem: “…One [LED] also exploded due to an accidental overvolt. Shot me in the Chest. Panel okay though” Nice work.
[buzzkill] brought this crazy christmas light controller to my attention. The hack is pretty neat. The potiometers in several standard dimmers were replaced with photo-resistors. When squares of the screen are lit, the dimmer is activated. In essence, it’s a cheap optoisolator for controlling AC power. The software that generates the interface appears to be sound actuated once it’s programmed by the user.
[sebastian] sent in his NES ‘repair’ how-to. (coral cache) It’s more of a guide to modding the NES for more user friendly operation. Emulators and a USB game pad usually do the job for me, but there’s nothing quite like the original hardware. Hmm, I just ran across my NES advantage joystick earlier today.
