Hacking Sleep

October 16, 2005 by 59 Comments

eye

Polyphasic sleep is a method for increasing the amount of time you spend awake during the day. By sleeping only twenty to thirty minutes every four hours you can stay awake longer. The short time you do spend sleeping the body is in REM sleep, which is the most restful phase. This technique has been used by many famous inventors. I first stumbled across this idea in an article on Kuro5hin. This mode of life can be very difficult to adjust to. In the first few days you probably won’t be asleep when you are trying to. You must strictly follow the sleep schedule. Skipping a nap will probably cause a major crash. With limited sleep a nutritious diet will become very important. Hack-A-Day reader [Nick Busey] is a week into his second attempt at switching to the Uberman cycle and is blogging his progress. If I were to attempt this I would probably get something like the Earlarm to help out. Of course if you’d rather sleep more you’re probably better off with the 28 hour day.

Continue reading “Hacking Sleep” →

Portable Electromechanical Slug Thrower

October 15, 2005 by 21 Comments

pest

The P.E.S.T. is a “centrifugal” launcher using a rotor powered by a DC motor to accelerate plastic BBs. It has a 50 round magazine and 3 fire modes: semi-auto, 3 round burst, and full-auto. Fire is not instantaneous because it takes 0.75 seconds for the rotor to spin up. If you follow this “read” link you’ll find a detailed description of the device. Photos can be found here.

Continue reading “Portable Electromechanical Slug Thrower” →

Hackaday Links

October 15, 2005 by 21 Comments

There was an Engadget post today about Motorola IMFrees that are free after rebate. From the IMFree hacking forum it appears that the project is still in pre-alpha.

Hack-A-Day isn’t hiring. Weblogs, Inc. is. They’re hiring for a new geek blog: “old skool geek as in comic book/sci-fi/D&D genre geeks”.

MAKE:Blog featured the Travel Tinker Trouble Kit that a lot of sites picked up. Julian has added a couple followup posts since then: one, two. I think a good companion to this would be the Altoids survival kit. [The Mark]

[Robogeek] continues to work on his LED bed design improvements.

[combustible] and his buddy Ken built this vodka filtering rig using four filter stages. The system is pressurized to 120psi. It took about 30 minutes to filter a 1.75 of vodka, but that was because the chilled vodka froze the latent water in the filters.

[JaSon] said that security took away their office’s “unapproved appliances” i.e. microwaves, toasters, etc. He’s looking for some rack mount projects that make these items look more official. Probably something a little more discrete than the 3U wine rack [jesse] found.

[Paul Stamatiou] has posted “Part 3: Azureus Anonymity” or “How to abuse the Tor network” DO NOT DO THIS Read the comments for suggestions that don’t involve hoarding bandwidth used to protect peoples lives.

[laughing man] didn’t like the low volume of his PSP headphones so he removed the resistors.

For those who hate traveling outside you could build a Surroundings Defense System. [Jon]

[Ian Nott] made an iPod video foldy to help people cope while waiting for delivery.

This is how I roll Darn this t-shirt addiction [via Waxy] UPDATE: I just saw BoingBoing’s post about someone hooking up their PS2 controller to an oscillating fan to complete the 10^6 rose level on Katamari. Go look at the screen shots so you don’t have to do it yourself.

The tip line

Continue reading “Hackaday Links” →

Roomba Rover

October 14, 2005 by 10 Comments

roomba rover

[heathkit] and a friend built this rover a couple years ago. They picked up a first generation Roomba because it had all of the features they were looking for: a good bump sensor, low profile, wheel encoders. Before removing the brains of the vacuum they put it in debug mode and figured out the control pinout. After wiring in a PIC they had rudimentary control of the device. For some higher level processing power they attached a Virgin Webplayer (defunct internet appliance). The Webplayer has a mini-pci slot so they added a WiFi card. Now they can transmit video and SSH into the device for full control.

Continue reading “Roomba Rover” →

Floppy Drive RC Car

October 13, 2005 by 30 Comments

floppy

Most people don’t use their floppy drive anymore so you might as well make a car out of it, right? If you short two sets of pins in the drive connector, the motor will spin freely when 5V is applied. This motor is used to drive the rear axle. The front wheel is steered using the read/write head’s stepper motor. An NE555 timer is used to pulse the motor when the steering buttons are pushed. This design is really simple and has a tethered control, but it is a good starting point if you want to try something else.

[thanks Boff]

Continue reading “Floppy Drive RC Car” →

USB And UDP Using An AVR

October 12, 2005 by 1 Comment

usb ir

If you understand that alphabet soup title you’re in for a treat. Igor Cesko’s original project was constructing an IR interface for his computer so he could control it remotely. He built a simple serial dongle for this task because he didn’t want to use a microcontroller for decoding the IR. USB is becoming far more common than serial interfaces so Igor decided to try programming a microcontroller for USB communication. His controller works for his IR project, but it should be easy to use for any other project you want a USB interface on. His most recent project was teaching an AVR to do UDP. Using his IR -> UDP device and a crossover cable he can place the receiver farther away from the computer. It requires a full duplex connection and has been tested connected directly to a NIC. It’s unknown whether it will function properly connected to a router.

[thanks johannes]

Continue reading “USB And UDP Using An AVR” →