Heat Pipe Wine Chiller PC Cooling


[Gordon Johnson] sent in one of the odder active cooling mods I’ve seen. Initially he planned to use lots of pennies to create the heat pipe, but ended up using some copper pipe with some pennies tacked on to mate to the cpu. The pipe carries the cpu heat from the case into a… wine cooler. Judging from the size, I’d guess that the cooler is one of the peltier variety. To see the final creation, I had to go through the slide show youtube video.

Serial Port Power Booster


This one(coral cache) is a bit of a head slapper, but I thought it might come in handy. Laptop (or usb) serial ports are pretty notorious for being stingy on power output. [Roberto] came up with a clever solution. He used a MAX205 (sort of a double+ MAX232) and a singe capacitor to convert the low power serial connection on his laptop to a TTL signal and back again to RS-232. The result is a simple dongle that needs 5v and gives you a high power serial port for those power hungry devices – like [Roberto]’s PIC programmer.

Bulletproof PC Case


Not our typical fare, but I can’t resist. [RCarter] is building a PC from scratch with a single unique feature – it’s designed to be bulletproof. Apparently, when it’s done he’s going to take it out back and teach it a lesson. Right now he’s more concerned with shock-proofing the hardware. Most people do this sort of thing at the end of the PC’s useful life.