[Fred] sent in this awesome hard drive clock. Nope, just parts of a HD into a clock, but the actual drive mechanism and heads are used for this one. The arms move in and out to indicate minutes and the platter position is used to show the hour. It uses a 50hz clock, logic chips and some scrounged parts to get it all done.
computer hacks1408 Articles
computer hacks
Add USB Ports And A Flash Drive To You UMPC
[ThoughtFix] sent in our first ever UMPC hack. It’s along the lines of laptop mods we’ve seen before, but he deserves credit for opening up the already tightly packed inside of his UMPC, tapping the USB interface on his bluetooth card, adding a hub and an internal usb flash drive to provide readyboost to speed up Vista.
DIY Encrypted NAS
VUFan – VU Meter
This hack isn’t really all that, but I’m giving it points for creativity. [Christopher] pulled some blue led case fans and used them to make a giant VU meter. Each I/O line has a transistor to drive a TIP120 FET. Personally, I’ll like to see even more of them stacked end to end and pulling fog from a conduit placed behind the stack.
Old Intel VPN To Wireless Router
Slapping a wifi card into a pc isn’t very ground breaking, but [Darkside] had to add a PCI header and trace the board just to hook up a keyboard before he could do much with his old intel vpn gateway. In the end, he added m0n0wall and a wireless card to turn it into a nice wireless router.
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.
Visual Computer Pong Player
I think it’d be more fun if the computer had to actuate a joystick, but [ashish]s visual based computer pong player is still pretty sweet. He’s capturing the game state with his webcam, and the computer processes the image and controls the pong paddle via tcp client connection based only on what it sees.
