Ergonomic Vertical Mouse

April 11, 2006 by 23 Comments

vertical mouse

I love waking up and finding a great project from a reader like this ergonomic mouse (cache). As you can see from the picture, the centerpiece is the massive scroll wheel made from a VCR head. He credits jpaturzo for the idea. The inertia of the wheel gives a lot better sense of how fast you are progressing through a document than methods like auto-scroll. The mouse is assumed to be more ergonomic because it keeps the bones in your forearm in line. The hand rest on the mouse is formed from Shapelock.

Continue reading “Ergonomic Vertical Mouse” →

Thermaltake Mini Fridge

April 10, 2006 by 23 Comments

thermaltake mini fridge

[Jared Bouck] has posted the latest project at Inventgeek: Thermaltake minifridge. Jared isn’t a big fan of the cost/reliability trade-off that comes with most overclocking projects so he decided to take on an entirely different cooling project. He found this Thermaltake case that resembled a refrigerator and took it the rest of the way. The cooling components came out of two 65W peltier camping coolers. After gutting the case, he mounted the power supply so that the intake and exhaust are external to the case. The peltier coolers were wired directly to the PS and the entire case was lined with foam. The last step was to add plexiglass ramps for the cans.

Continue reading “Thermaltake Mini Fridge” →

Fan Controller

April 9, 2006 by 18 Comments

fan controller

Unhappy with commercial fan controllers Jos van Eijndhoven decided to build his own. The circuit supports three LM60 temperature sensors with pots to adjust the turn on temp. A PIC 16F676 microcontroller reads the temps and controls three groups of fans. A potentiometer is also supplied to control the minimum fan speed. To prevent oscillation the fan speed is reduced slowly in response to temperature drop.

[thanks Alan]

Continue reading “Fan Controller” →

DIY Surround Headphones

April 8, 2006 by 13 Comments

surround headphones

I was stumbling through HeadWize‘s project archive the other day when I came across Steve Connor’s Poor Man’s Surround Headphones. He used a pair of Sony MDR-CD60 for the base and added three pairs of ear buds. One pair is used for the front channel and two for the rears. The rears have their own amp with the bass turned up to increase the separation. He used a Sound Blaster Live! card for the source. If you are interested in amplifiers and other sound projects, you should definitely have a look at HeadWize.

Continue reading “DIY Surround Headphones” →

DD-WRT Running On WRT54G Version 5

April 7, 2006 by 13 Comments

With version 5 of the WRT54G, Linksys decided to dump Linux and start using VxWorks. This made buying a WRT a gamble if you wanted one with Linux. DD-WRT recently released a micro version that supports version 5. You’ll need a JTAG cable to install it since very little is known about VxWorks bootloader. Even with this new firmware it’s hard to ignore that the router is underpowered and you’d be better off with something else.

[via Digg]

Continue reading “DD-WRT Running On WRT54G Version 5” →

CarPC Shutdown Controller

April 6, 2006 by 25 Comments

inverter

I’m sure most people that have built a CarPC are already familiar with shutdown controllers, but I think this hack is pretty clever. Computers don’t like being turned off suddenly so you need to figure out how to power down the PC safely. This circuit has a serial connector and appears to XP as a generic UPS. When the ignition is turned off it breaks the 5V line to COM pin 8. XP responds by hibernating. Once the computer shuts down the relay for the power inverter opens. When the ignition is switched on the inverter powers up and the computer turns on.

[thanks SilverPill]

Continue reading “CarPC Shutdown Controller” →

Boot Camp… I Give Up

April 6, 2006 by 45 Comments

bootcamp

UPDATE: I’ve solved my issues click the “Continue reading” link.

I’m sure you saw the news of Apple releasing the Windows bootloader Boot Camp yesterday. My current desktop machine is a Core Duo Mac mini so I figured I’d give it a shot (so I could run four folding threads, naturally). I downloaded the Boot Camp package and upgraded the mini’s firmware. The first thing the Boot Camp install assistant does is burn a driver disc for use after the XP install is complete. Once this is done it shrinks the HFS+ partition and creates an empty partition for Windows. It then asks you to insert the XP install disk (must have SP2). The Windows install proceeded normally and Windows booted. This is where my trouble began: the drivers didn’t apply cleanly. I could have retried but for one serious problem. To get the initial boot device selection screen to appear you have to hold down the “alt” key while the machine is starting. The only USB keyboard I have is a Gyration wireless one. The boot menu only showed up at best 1 in 10 attempts. Apple does provide software to choose which OS you want to boot by default, but since the Windows drivers didn’t install there was no guarantee I could flip the switch back to OS X once I was in XP. I decided the flaky “alt” key detection was probably my wireless keyboard not being fully initialized, so I made a late night run to the Megalomart to buy the cheapest wired USB keyboard they had. I plugged it in and tried to bring up the boot menu; it didn’t work a single time. So, my experiment is over for now since I don’t want to get trapped in XP. Hopefully they fix this public beta so that is has an actual boot menu, with a countdown, like every other bootloader. UNEASYsilence has a video of how this install should go.

Continue reading “Boot Camp… I Give Up” →