We’ve posted Part Two of the Magic Phone How-To over at Engadget. In this Installment, we show you the process behind creating the custom circuit that will live inside the rotary phone. This circuit is as small as possible by making it two-sided and by using surface mount components. Part One of the How-To covered number pad matrix decoding on just about any phone or number pad.
[sbeam] was really excited about his latest acquisition: an Amstrad CPC 464. This model has a tape deck instead of a floppy drive. sbeam had no way of transferring software on his computer to the Amstrad. He looked around and found the PlayTZX tool. PlayTZX reads a .tzx tape backup and generates a WAV file. sbeam dumped these conversions onto his iPod Shuffle and used a car cassette adapter to play them in the Amstrad’s deck. Nice new school solution for old hardware.
Once Scot got his second motorcycle it became very apparent that he needed to figure out a way to transfer his gadget gear between bikes. A simple trailer connector is used to provide 12V to the bag. This power is distributed by a block with three switches on it. One powers the map light. Another powers the radar detector. The third switch is for a future MP3 player. With some cable shortening Scot was able to get the radar detector and its display into the bag. Now by simply disconnecting the power lead he can move the whole bag to a different bike.
[thanks Sleekblack]
The HD4478 is an extremely common LCD controller. The folks at Sorgonet got this particular display out of an old credit card reader. It’s easy to talk to these controllers using just a parallel port cable. With the lcdmod project you can send text strings directly to the display from the command line. Sorgonet has a lot of related LCD links if you are interested in putting a display on your next project.
[thanks h-tech]
Pasteler0 wanted to build an external control system for Winamp. Using the COM-port plugin he was able to wire up 4 control buttons directly to his serial port. The software also supports a 15 button mode. The switches are mounted in a clear plastic floppy disk box and connected to the computer serial port using CAT5. It’s a nice hardwired solution for control, but if you want just a simple remote, try WinLIRC.
Follow along as reader [anonymous Gort] swaps the guts of two hard drives to bring one back from the land of the dead.
Someone at work had a laptop computer they never backed up. They traveled 1000 miles to give a presentation, using the laptop
[h. p. friedrichs] (AC7ZL) has some great plans for building a crystal radio. The stator coil and output coil are wrapped around the outside of a CDR sleeve. The tuning capacitor is constructed by sandwich two clear CDs between metal and attaching this inside the top of the sleeve. The rotor shaft is mounted using the bushings from a pair of disassembled potentiometers. A hot needle is used to tap the stator coil through the housing every fifth turn. Even though the parts aren’t very traditional it looks like a really solid radio. He’s got instructions for building a matching ear piece out of tea tins too.
