[PaulJ] sent in this older, but excellent little hack to silence your mouse. Don’t like the click that your mouse makes? If your mouse has the right kind of switch inside, it can be quieted down with a quick soldering job. Just remove it, turn the upper half around and re-assemble.
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computer hacks
Spread Spectrum Freq Hopping USB RF Modem
Since I mentioned Sparkfun electronics in the parts finding how-to, I started poking around their forums and stumbled across this interesting USB RF modem. It uses an off the shelf Semtec DP1205 RF module that’s controlled by a PIC 18F2550. The really interesting thing is that it uses spread spectrum frequency hopping – which means that by FCC rules, it can transmit up to 1 watt at 900Mhz.
Blowable Computer Interface
Remember Christopher Reeve’s blow controlled wheel chair? [Shwetak] sent in his blowable computer interface. It doesn’t require anything but an on-board microphone and a decent set of lungs. It works by taking audio fingerprints to determine the location on the screen that you’re exhaling on. The demo video (avi) shows off some surprisingly accurate location detection. You can get a few more details from his research paper. (If you need a decent avi video player, check out VLC player.)
Laser Camera Tracking
[ashish] is still having fun with his lasers. His latest hack is a dual laser based tracking camera. He mounted his camera to a simple parallel port controlled stepper motor. Essentially, if the camera loses track of either laser, it tracks to locate the lost edge of the object. I’d probably go with IR to reduce the chance of retina damage…
Simple USB Plug
I’m more into this one just for the simple USB plug than the joke that it’s used for. I’ve seen similar on extra small USB flash drives, but those are generally pre-etched. The idea is to use a piece of proto board to make a USB plug an mount a superbright LED on it. Pie indeed.
Ion Cooler 3.0 (return Of InventGeek)
[Jared]s been taking a bit of a hiatus, but he assures me that he’s gearing up for a bunch of new projects. The first sign that he’s awakened from his slumber is his latest take on the Ion Cooler. This time he’s built a CPU specific version. The cooler is made from off the shelf materials – heap pipe heat sink, copper pipe, tack nails, acrylic and even the ion generator are easy to get. It’s an interesting way to cool your PC if your comfortable with 10,000 volts or so next to your CPU.
Stroboscope LED Fan Clock
[sprite_tm] sent in one of his latest little adventures – and I love it. To create his stroboscope fan clock, he put a couple of red and green clock hands onto a standard PC fan(I love Panaflo fans), then he built a circuit to strobe a RGB LED to create a set of virtual clock hands on the spinning fan. An ATTiny2313 does all the work, with the help of some transistors to drive the LEDs.
