[Jussi Saarijoki] had a broken LCD monitor and decided to use it as a photography light instead of letting it sit on his shelf of “oblivion”. Only the panel was broken; the cold cathode and diffuser were still intact. He stripped off all of the outer casing and pulled the broken panel. After reassembling he did a couple test shots. The large panel works really well for providing ambient light and making shadows a lot less harsh.
Continue reading “Macro Photography Light From Broken LCD Monitor”
Feeling a bit nostalgic, reader [blurry] decided to write this Apple Game Server in Java using the rxtx library. The server eliminates the need for a floppy drive on your Apple //. You just need to connect the Apple // to your computer using a null modem cable and you will have access multiple games. To get started you tell the Apple // to accept serial commands. Then the Java program takes over, typing the loader program one line at a time. It takes about 15 seconds. Once that’s done you’re presented with a menu to boot whatever game you want.
The Alesis HR-16 was an inexpensive, easy-to-use MIDI drum machine from the early ’90s. [Burnkit2600] had a lot of experience circuit bending the HR-16 and decided to burn some custom sound ROMs for it. The HR-16 has two 32-pin ROMs that are conveniently socketed. He pulled the chips and dumped the image using an EPROM reader/writer. The ROM only contains sound samples, so you can open it up in raw mode using a program like Sound Forge. The samples are separated by short negative regions. All you need to do is place your new samples between the pits and burn a new ROM. You can piggy back the chips using the chip enable line to add even more samples.
[Jeroen Domburg], one of our favorite hackers, has posted how to replace a cold cathode based backlight with white LEDs. He had recently purchased an HP Jornada 680 on eBay and the backlight was looking very pinkish. The Jornada has a QWERTY keyboard, CF slot, PCMCIA slot and can run Linux. Sounds like a pretty decent mini-terminal (now that we posted it you won’t be able to find one cheap though). In the space where the backlight was he was able to place 14 white LEDs. To get the 40V necessary to drive the series he built a boost-converter using an ATTiny13. The new backlight is just as bright and uses a 1/3 less power than the original. Half the Jornada’s power was being used by the original backlight, so this mod should give a decent increase in battery life as well.
[Avelino Herrera Morales] wrote in to tell us about his Game Boy Advance MIDI project. It’s pretty neat since it only takes two resistors and a link cable to use. The link cable has a slotted connector so you can use a chunk of protoboard to connect to the pins. He has software the does all of the MIDI packet generation. As an example, he uses the GBA to control a Chameleon synthesizer.
[th0mas] has a fun guide to modifying the boot image in your BIOS. This could very easily brick your laptop, but it’s interesting to see how it’s done. He starts by dumping the plain text strings. The magic number for bitmap format appears in the file so he copies a large chunk of data starting at that point. th0mas opens this in MSPaint to maintain the format. After modifying the image it’s placed back in the BIOS file and a couple checks are performed to make sure only the image data has changed. The final section involves running the flash utility in a debugger to find where it checks the CRC. By modifying the program he can then flash the image without the program complaining.
Gerald Heine’s stereo microscope uses a field sequential method for generating 3D video. A CRT draws half the screen’s lines with each frame. So, if you send the video from two different cameras on alternating frames you can generate a 3D using shutter glasses. Gerald’s setup uses the sync signal from one camera to control the other. Both video signals are fed into his custom 3D video sync box which combines the frames into a single video feed and also outputs a control signal for shutter glasses.
