Emulating Ink Cartridges

February 2, 2011 by Caleb Kraft 15 Comments

[Smartie_on_computer] wanted to do some experimenting with an epson printer. After getting a somewhat disassembled one, the first step was to simply get it running. Unfortunately, one of the ink cartridges was missing and these printers refuse to do pretty much anything without all the cartridges installed. Rather than go purchase a costly cartridge that they didn’t intend to actually use, [Smartie_on_computer], chose to emulate the cartridge using a microcontroller. After some searching for the protocol used on the cartridge, the info ended up being in the patent. [Smartie_on_computer] now has a functional printer that is destined to be a 3d printer in the near future. You can see a video breakdown after the break.

Continue reading “Emulating Ink Cartridges” →

Fabulous Magic 8 Ball Prank

January 28, 2011 by Caleb Kraft 37 Comments

Hackaday forum user [arfink] has shown us a brilliant practical joke he built. This is a magic 8 ball that will blind you with a flash when you flip it over. Have you ever been in a room with one of these and not flipped it over? Neither have we. Using a basic flash circuit ripped from a disposable camera in conjunction with a mercury switch, this project took him about 2 hours to make. Admittedly, most of that time was just trying to split the 8 ball in half without completely destroying it. The circuit is pretty simple. Just figure out what 2 wires need to be crossed to trigger the flash and install your tilt switch there. He added a power cut off so you could disable it as well.

UPDATE: video added after the break! Continue reading “Fabulous Magic 8 Ball Prank” →

Converting 8mm Film To Digital

January 15, 2011 by Caleb Kraft 24 Comments

Many of us have these old 8mm family videos lying around and many of us have lamented at the perspective cost to get them converted to digital. [Paul] came up with a pretty slick way of digitizing them himself. He cracked open an 8mm projector and replaced the drive motor with one he could run at a much slower speed, allowing him to be able to capture each frame individually with his digital camera. He’s rigged his remote shutter control to the shutter of the projector so that it would be perfectly synchronized. There’s a video of it in action on the flickr page, and a video of the full 16,000 frame clip after digitization here.

[via Make]

Making Punch Card Programming A Snap

January 6, 2011 by Mike Szczys 47 Comments

About thirty years ago [H. P. Friedrichs] pulled off a hack that greatly improved the process of programming with punch cards. At the time, his school had just two IBM 029 keypunch machines. One of them is shown in the upper right and it uses a keyboard to choose which parts of each card should be punched out. This was time-consuming, and one misplaced keystroke could ruin the card that you were working on. Since you had to sit at the machine and type in your source code these machines were almost always in use.

But wait, the school acquired a dozen of the TRS-80 computers seen in the lower left. They were meant to be used when teaching BASIC, but [HPF] hatched a plan to put them to task for punch card generation. He built his own interface hardware that connected to the expansion port of the new hardware. Using his custom interface a student could create a virtual card deck that could be rearranged and revised to correct mistakes in the source code. The hardware then allows the virtual deck to be dumped in to the punching machine. This broke the bottleneck caused by students sitting at the punch card terminal.

We think that [HPF] sent in this project after seeing the antiquated hardware from that 1970’s calculator. These hacks of yore are a blast to revisit so don’t be afraid to tip us off if you know of a juicy one.

Calc Is High-tech For 1970’s Homebrew

January 1, 2011 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

Just one look at that banner image and you’ve got to be thinking “that’s old”! This 1970’s era home made calculator used a 4-function calculator IC that was quite advanced for its time. The only problem is that the chip couldn’t do anything other than calcuations, which left it up to the maker of this dinosaur to get the display and keypad working. Circuit boards were made by drawing on copper clad with resist marker. These controlled the VFD digits for the IC’s output and also fed it the user inputs.

[Thanks Brian]

MIT Inspired Impromptu SegStick

December 27, 2010 by Greg R. Jacobs 15 Comments

If many of the readers out there longed for a Segway for Christmas but Santa didn’t bring you one, you are in luck. The aptly named Seg-Stick by [scolton] is a great way for cheap transportation. It uses a broomstick, along with two DeWalt cordless drills to power this bad boy on 6” wheels. Like articles done before on Hack a Day this is an awesome although rudimentary example of the things that can be made with a short amount of time, some determination, and a few power tools. Great job [scolton].

Build A Fusion Reactor In Your Home

December 27, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 55 Comments

At first we were pretty skeptical of this home made fusion reactor instructable. However, we’ve seen home made fusion reactors before, so it is technically possible, we guess. The construction alone is interesting enough to warrant a few moments of looking.

We’re not experts, so pardon us if we can’t tell you exactly what is going on, but we can appreciate the craftsmanship involved with the build. The vacuum chamber specifically is quite nice.

We know that some of our commenters probably have more experience here. Tell us, does this thing look legit?