BMOW: A Home Made Cpu

February 27, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 34 Comments

bmow

Building your own CPU sounds like quite a daunting task as it is. Building your own CPU using manual wire wrapping transcends difficult to become an art form. [Steve] has built a CPU by manually wrapping every single wire. That’s 1253 wires, or 2506 wrapped ends. Even if it didn’t work, it would be nice to look at. But it does work, you can see a demo video showing the audio functions after the break. The system is now enclosed in an Acer x-terminal case, so it isn’t as pretty, but its still quite a project. You can follow along as he builds each section, the video, sound, even the keyboard interface. It’s pretty amazing seeing it all broken down to the most basic forms.

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AVR Mega8 RSS Reader

February 26, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 16 Comments

[Barney_1] built this sereial RSS reader. He’s using the Dragon Rider 500 development board, which is a kit that has expansions available including the LCD, serial interface, and power supply. You don’t need the kit though, you could just build your own with similar specs. He has written a program in python to scrape RSS feeds and send them to the LCD. He’s got some specific workarounds for the Dragon Rider board if you do have one. You can download the firmware and source code on his site. You can see a video of it after the break.

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PropIRC: Propeller Based IRC Client

February 25, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 18 Comments

propeller

Many people don’t want to miss anything in their IRC room, so they “idle” or just leave the client open to capture all the conversations. It can be annoying to have it going in the background on your computer though. To remedy this, [Harrison] built a simple computer from a propeller microcontroller that’s only purpose is to connect to IRC servers. It can take a regular PS2 keyboard and works with a standard monitor at 1024×768. It’s compact size and low power requirements make it quite a useful tool to have around if you are always on IRC. you can download the source code and schematics on the site.

[Thanks Scott]

Windows 95 Running On An N95

February 24, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 43 Comments

windows

We’ve had this same hack submitted by two people, pointing to two different(translated) sources(translated) today. It seems with a recent version of dos box, you can load windows 3.1 or windows 95 on N95 or N85 devices. They’re both in polish, so they may be the same people posting in different places. If you can follow along, there seems to be sufficient information to do this yourself. We don’t know why you would want to, but you could. You can see a video of it in action after the break.

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False Theremin

February 23, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 18 Comments

fth

[vilxes91] sent in this cool little false-theremin (translated). Its a pretty simple circuit, that can fit in really small places. It isn’t a true theremen because it uses the amount of light coming in around the lid for the modulation. To play it, you turn it on and open it up, the more open the lid, the higher the pitch. You can see a video of it in action after the break.

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NES Controller On A DS

February 22, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 13 Comments

nesds

You can get most of the old NES games for the DS, but they just don’t feel the same. Sure your hands still cramp up, but its just not the same cramp we remember. What is the solution? Put an old Nintendo Entertainment System controller on your DS. [Parker] did exactly that. The method he used is fairly strait forward. He opened the DS, wired extensions onto the buttons he wanted to use to a controller. Instead of making it permanent though, he chose to wire it through the GBA slot. This allows him to plug the controller in whenever he wants to use it. This reminds us of the PSP with a SNES controller we covered back in October.

You can see a video of it in action after the break. You’ll notice in the video, he has also modded his buttons to have LEDs behind them.

In the comments, [tri-edge] points out that you can follow his build in the acidmods forum. There seem to be some other variations as well, including an SNES controller.

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High Quality Macro Lens

February 21, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 6 Comments

alligator

[Chris] wanted to do some macro photography, but found the price tag off putting. He was looking at roughly $800 for a decent macro lens. Instead, he decided to build his own. He wanted to build a lens that could be removed and used just like his normal lenses. He picked up a standard Canon AF lens for $10 to start with. He has posted detailed steps on how he modded it to work, and you can see the results are quite stunning. Great job [Chris]. If you want to try your hand at macro photography but don’t think you can pull of a job like this, you might want to check out the pringles can macro lens.