Ardupilot: Arduino Based UAV Autopilot


A short while back, [Chris Anderson] released an Arduino based autopilot. It rings in fairly cheap and being open source, you can tweak away. To add more functionality, he’s releasing a dual core version. Thanks to the second processor, it no longer requires an external hardware co-pilot. It uses an on-board GPS and features an ATtiny based fail safe. It’s still under development, but he’s made the design files available.

External CD-ROM Turned Class A Headphone Amp


[Gio] sent in this slick Class A headphone amp. An old CD-ROM case was gutted to hold the goods. The design is fairly simple. Cost can be kept fairly low although the capacitors can add up if you’re a fanatic about quality. If you’ve ever lost any of your headphone gear to sticky fingers, you know that having it blending in to the background can be a great feature.

On-board Focus Confirmation For The Canon Digital Rebel


We’ve seen plenty of lens hacks, but [Koray] took things in a new direction. Rather than buy lens chips for modding all of his manual lenses, he added a lens chip inside his Digital Rebel 300D (aka XT). Most of us might cringe at gutting their Rebel, but he performed this bit of soldering surgery on a unit he picked up for £40 and repaired. Excellent work!

Update: yeah yeah, the 300D is the original Digital Rebel.

LED Serial Debugging For Cell Phone Hacking


[Barry] needed some way to get serial output to help debug his efforts to port Linux to the HTC TytnII (Windows mobile Pocket PC phone). He wrote some code to send serial output via one of the LEDs on the phone and rigged up an AVR to pic up the output and provide a USB interface to the computer. It runs at about 200bps – perfect for the quick debug session.