Here’s another bizarre keyboard mod to add to the pile. Unlike previous typewriter style mods, this one uses Scrabble tiles. All of the tiles were hand beveled and attached to a clicky keyboard. The Num, Cap, and Scroll lock buttons have their letters’ hollowed out so the LED light will shine through.
[via Gizmodo]
The CREATE USB Interface (CUI) was a project that came out of UC Santa Barbara around the same time the Arduino was being developed. It has a USB port, a PIC18F4550, and a prototyping area. It was designed to enable easy interfacing with the real would through many A/D inputs and general I/O ports. It supports both OSC and MIDI-over-USB natively. The biggest difference between the CUI and the Arduino is its USB support. The Arduino uses an FTDI chip to create a serial interface to its onboard AVR. The CUI’s PIC has native support for USB. That means you can have the CUI appear to be any USB HID device you want: keyboard, mouse, game controller, etc.
The Arduino has a friendly development environment and a large following though. CUI create [Dan Overholt] decided to add an ATmega168 to his board to get the best of both worlds, the CUIduino (scroll down). It can be programmed just like any other Arduino compatible device, but the having the CUI parent means your Arduino project can behave like a native USB HID gadget.
[Thanks Peter]
Network engineer [Mario Giambanco] recently purchased a cable to move his flash off camera. Unfortunately, it ended up way too short for his purposes. Instead of purchasing a slightly longer proprietary cable, he decided to employ what he had around him: a lot of cat5e cable and ethernet jacks. He cut the cable close to the center in case things didn’t work out and he’d need to repair it. His post on building the custom ethernet flash extension cable goes into heavy detail to make sure you get it right the first time. He’s tested it using both five and 50 foot pieces of cable with no apparent lag.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen cat5 repurposed: composite video through cat5, vga cat5 extension, and cat5 speaker cables.
[via Lifehacker]
[thecapacity] sent us his iobridge project where he controls a coil gun with a Wiimote. To make the coil gun, he took apart an office golf putter that had a ball return. The mechanism to return the ball is a metal cylinder that is moved magnetically. He simply replaced the cylinder with a smaller diameter piece of metal to create the gun. His computer monitors the Wiimote axis changes and sends them to the ioBridge. The unit could be located anywhere, but without a camera on it, he’ll have a hard time aiming. There’s a video of it working after the break.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9S9SZswOC0]
If you like the sound of the theramin, you may enjoy the Ondestrak. Based loosely off of the Ondes Martnot, the Ondestrak works by changing the pitch of a continuous note. [Devin_mccutchen] built his using an old gametrak controller. The controller looks pretty cool. We hadn’t seen that one before. Check out a more musical performance after the break.
[Matt] sent us this very cool looking project called Illuminato. After brainstorming on how to improve upon the Arduino, and receiving lots of input on his ideas, [Matt] has put together this board that has several nice improvements. It has more I/O, more code space, faster serial communication speeds, built in PWM, and works with existing Arduino shields. Not only does it make these improvements, but it does it with style. The finish is quite nice, the layout is pleasing and it even has two rows of SMD LEDs on the back for some added geek cred. You can see a couple videos of it in action after the break.
It’s amazing what [Ben Heckendorn] can manage to crank out in just five hours. This time it’s a wireless Xbox 360 controller stuffed inside an Atari 2600 controller. The guts are from a Guitar Hero 3 controller. It’s a fairly compact board and [Ben] used thin ATA wire for the connections. While it doesn’t have all the buttons of a true Xbox controller, this 3600 controller has enough to make it useful in arcade games. The joystick portion was reused without any modification. Things like the guide button and ring of light are located underneath.
