My biquad how-to was up on Engadget yesterday; lots of good comments. I’d play with it some more, but it is getting way too cold outside.
The Team Hack-A-Day folding forum is growing, but where is kcrone_ (one of our biggest producers)? Found on the forum: Kit’s automated vodka filter.
[8Ball] was interested in building a Google Maps based service, but didn’t know where to start. Luckily he stumbled across Peter Rukavina’s Charlottetown Transit Map. The project shows the bus routes and has schedule popups linked to each of the stops. Peter was nice enough to include full source code for how this was implemented in PHP and Javascript. He also describes setting up the necessary MySQL tables.
I’ve seen a lot of MP3 player projects, but this has to be one of the simplest designs yet. Control is from a PIC16LF877. Files are read from the compact flash card’s root directory in the order in which they were copied. This data is streamed byte by byte to the vs1001k decoder chip with a built in DAC.
If this project seems a little hard you might want to check out one of Raphael’s other projects: Alarm Clock of the Short Now [via MAKE]. It’s designed for people that don’t have a regular sleep schedule, like me.
[thanks iamdigitalman]
While sitting in the heat at Defcon I wondered what the best activity for next year could be. I think liquid nitrogen ice cream has some great potential. It’s a pretty common freshman chemistry demo where you add liquid nitrogen to a standard ice cream recipe. As the -320degreeF nitrogen boils off it freezes the ice cream mixture resulting in one of the smoothest ice creams you’ll ever encounter. It is a simple task and you’ll see quite a few people that have tried it if you just google for it. Wear eye protection and heavy rubber gloves when working with liquid nitrogen. You’ll need at least a 5:1 ratio of N2 to ice cream. Mix it in a large metal container; a pressure cooker is probably your best bet. Most recommend mixing with a wooden spoon, but I think I’ll agree with DocBug “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing with power tools“.
[thanks XyTec]
Reader [Krome] wanted a reliable, modular, weather proof WiFi bridge. The outer weather box was purchased for $50. The main radio is a proprietary Wi-Lan HP45-24. A lightning arrestor is included because this proprietary box was purchased before the WiFi band was official allocated and would be hard to replace. A Linksys WRT54G is used as the local access point and is connected to a Hyperlink 500mW amplifier. The Wi-Lan box and the amplifier have their antennas connected to panel connectors on the outside of the box. The WRT and Wi-Lan box are both powered by an ATX power supply while the amp is connected to the pass-through. Looks like a really solid setup and it should be easy to replace individual components if they fail.
There has been a lot of buzz this week about Flickrfs the virtual filesystem for Flickr. Using Flickrfs you can interact with Flickr tags and photos just like your regular filesystem. A similar service is GmailFS which lets you mount a Gmail account as a large virtual filesystem. Both of these services are built on top of FUSE. FUSE makes it easy to build fully functional filesystems inside of a userspace program. Users can script and manipulate files just like their regular files. FUSE is now part of the main Linux kernel with release 2.6.14. Check out the list of other interesting filesystems built using FUSE. Of particular interest: WikipediaFS, SMB for FUSE is similar to Network Neighborhood, SSHFS, btslave to mount torrent files, and djmount is a UPnP AV client.
I’d found plenty of documentation on the iPod’s dock pinout and serial based remote interface, but never a decent explanation of how to actually implement it. Finally I found BigCookie’s iPod to T&A remote control adapter tucked away in the iPod Linux wiki. He built the controller to receive remote signals from his T&A audio receiver and then translate them to control the iPod. He’s got schematics and code for a a PIC16F628 microcontroller. I’m guessing the code could be adapted to support almost any input method the PIC supports.
