USB Rotary Channel Changer

June 26, 2005 by 2 Comments

rotary switch

Kentaro Fukuchi originally built this simple controller for an art installation. He needed an easy way for visitors to switch effects on an EffecTV system. To avoid writing device drivers he canabilized a cheap game pad. There were 16 available buttons but only 12 were needed. Once the rotary switch was wired to all of the buttons he could use simple scripting to grab the button press events. You could use this to control a variety of things and Kentaro gives a couple possible ideas on his site.

[thanks Jaime Wong]

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Home Built Water Injection

June 25, 2005 by 34 Comments

water injection

Okay, so you’ve built your manual boost controller and want to know what to add next? Water injection is the answer. Okay maybe if the original question was “what’s the last thing you want to spray into your engine?” On turbo cars water injection helps cool the injection charge as it enters the engine. Compressing air generates a lot of heat and the hotter the air/fuel mixture is when it enters the engine the more likely it is to detonate. You can use a water/alcohol mixture to cool your intercooler or you can spray it into the intake air. This guide shows you how to assemble a home built water injection system that has been proven to reduce intake temperatures by 90F. It also includes notes on how to do this without hydrolocking your engine. Handy!

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Hackaday Links

June 25, 2005 by 14 Comments

Links

to anyone who attended the philly meeting last night, i hope you guys had a great time together and i apologize for not being able to come. some personal matters came up that i needed to attend to. so thanks for understanding.

youse guys (in joe pesci voice) sent in alotta nice lookin links! because of that, i’m totally teasing you guys by only posting 5 links today. plus, this’ll give you more to look forward to! but, as always, if you guys hate it, i’ll stop.

link time!

build your own cockpit. yup. [brett]
haha i love it. the poor man’s raid array. [chappa]
make a simple 1 watt amplifier. [joe]
wicked flickr photoset of a guy learning how to pirate tv.
make a simple spectroscope.

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Technics 1200 Pitch Lock Removal

June 24, 2005 by 8 Comments

pitch mod

Yes, even the venerable Technics 1200 turntable can be improved. This simple, completely reversible, modification removes the automatic pitch lock from the mk2 model. If your decks have seen a lot of use the true zero point has probably drifted from the one marked on the scale. This is easy to tell by observing the strobe. If the large dots aren’t stationary when the zero is locked, you’re out of adjustment. The other nuisance is that you can’t do minor pitch adjustments when you are close to zero because it constantly wants to lock. Even if you don’t want to mod your turntables this article does show you where to go to move the zero pitch back to the actual zero.

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Hackaday Lazy Afternoons

June 24, 2005 by 7 Comments

Lazy Afternoons

good afternoon readers! I hope some of you had good meetings yesterday and that the rest of you will attend one today. the philly one is at 7:30pm tonight and at 34th and chestnut on drexel field. simple enough. we’ll probably also move the meetings back to thursdays. a lot of people (including myself somewhat) don’t wanna give up our weekend, which is understandable.

last night i went to gameriot at the TLA. and oh boy, it was insane. it’s amazing what a fake press pass will do for you. i was up on stage hosting with mtv2, interviewing everyone left and right, and watched world halo 2 champion zylos kill everyone hardcore. you can find a writeup of that with 40 pics and video on joystiq later today/maybe tomorrow. be sure to check it out.

i have to admit, it’s a very interesting form of advertising. [christian]
wicked! a bluetooth pistol mouse. [bt]
make a master key for master locks for a buck. [w1cked]
getting laptops cool creatively and for a good cause! [ian]
discontinued, but someone should start it back up. [crash]

about as ghetto of a hack as you can think of.  [_nic]
make a zipit wireless backlight. very useful when doing other zipit hacks. [ben]

Now, for your lazy afternoon hack, we have one that’ll come in handy for when you travel. If you’re staying at a Hilton hotel, there’s a way you can get every single tv and movie channel from them. Sure it involves disconnecting the cable etc., but there’s no harm in that. Reader [psiveteran] did a great writeup about it in detail and how you too can ahh…..accquire cable. He even linked back to us. How nice. You can view the article here.

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Staff Of Doom

June 23, 2005 by 8 Comments

walking stick

Yeah, I nearly labeled it “Staff of doomed social life”. John, a Penn state undergrad, whipped together this glowing walking stick. Okay “whipped’ is an understatement; he bothered to model it in Rhino before assembly. So, if you’re bored with building lightsabers or you’re just tired of the balrogs in your basement this is the project for you. Keep up the good work John and for your sake I hope I don’t see “gandalfkid.wmv” in my inbox anytime soon.

[thanks Deepomega]

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