[Keith]’s cousin gave him a LCD with a noisy backlight. He decided to replace it with a series of high output LEDs. He sourced some locally in the form of cheap LED headlamps from an auto-parts store. The results look pretty good – and the write up contains this gem: “…One [LED] also exploded due to an accidental overvolt. Shot me in the Chest. Panel okay though” Nice work.
computer hacks1399 Articles
computer hacks
Optoisolated Xmas Light Control
[buzzkill] brought this crazy christmas light controller to my attention. The hack is pretty neat. The potiometers in several standard dimmers were replaced with photo-resistors. When squares of the screen are lit, the dimmer is activated. In essence, it’s a cheap optoisolator for controlling AC power. The software that generates the interface appears to be sound actuated once it’s programmed by the user.
The Simpler USB2LCD
USB LCD interfaces aren’t new around here. [John] sent this latest one. It uses a single ATMega chip and a few cheap components to implement the whole thing. The venerable HD44780 compatible is the text LCD of choice.
I’m on vacation at the moment, but I’ll start putting up some Hack-A-Day design challenge entries pretty soon.
Laser 3d Scanning With A Webcam
[Jan] noted that they’ve come up with an interesting, low cost method of 3d scanning over (Update: http://www.david-laserscanner.com/wiki) at the Institute for Robotics and Process Control. Once the software is calibrated with the preset background image, a laser line is run over the object (Just think about every sci-fi laser scanner you’ve ever seen) The software appears to measure the contour of the object by the breaks in the line as it’s passed over the object. Once a mesh of measurements is taken, the object can be reconstructed in the software. According to [Jan] “With Their technique they won the Main Prize of the “work group for Pattern recognition” this Year in Berlin.” Now, make it work under something besides windows and .NET.
Get your Design Challenge entries in! The 25th is rolling up on us quick!
Ballast… Overclocking
I started to put up this after the wash with the pentium heater. Of course, we had it already. (and it’s a fake to top it off) Sigh. There’s nothing like making yourself look like an idiot on friday night. The comments below are from my bungle, I’m not going to delete them.
Instead, I bring you an interesting thread on overclocking HID Metal Halide lamp ballasts over on the lumenlab forums. [arizonavideo] did some interesting experiments. A majority of the experiments involved changing capacitance values on transformer style ballasts. At one point he combined a 400 and 600 watt ballast in series to run a lamp at over 1000 watts. (it was rated for 400) He even smashed a bulb just so he could measure the arc tube.
Pentium Powered Extra With Friggin’ Lasers
[Neil] sent along this one and I found this one highly amusing. The latest use for recycling those old cpus: overvolt them a bit with a USB cable and keep your coffee cup warm. Use them as dressing for heat generating resistors.
[nik] came up with a non-destructive way to mount an external wi-fi antenna to his thinkpad. I like it, but I think you need a double height PCMCIA slot to fit it – Maybe a slimmer version could be built for a powerbook/macbook.
[Hybrid] found some interesting diy LASER projects. Including a $10 air laser. Sweet.
[joek1010] noted some interesting webcam laser hacks. The laser tracing webcam has definite possibilities.
[dualbandit] found a similar twist, but this time a laser pointer is used to remote control a mediacenter.
In case you’ve been following it, my DIY HD projector build on Engadget is finished up with the final review. I’m pleased with the image quality, but I’ll probably be tweaking the lamp/reflector assembly a bit.
Oh, and if you were into exploiting vending machines and getting free coke, it looks like they’ve pushed out a firmware patch.
Remember, only 11 more days to get your entry in for the Design Challenge. Just check out the prizes if you need motivation.
DIY Russian EL Display
Well, I’m pretty sure this is a hand made radioactive (as in Radium) electroluminescent display. The original post was in Russian, and it’s translated version doesn’t read very coherently. It appears they they borrowed a street sign, melted the radium paint down and painted their own display. In the end, they wired it up to a Sinclair Z80. Funky. Thanks [Viktos]
