Thank [J. Peterson] for this one. Kits don’t usually end up as the daily post on Hackaday, but the altair was one of the first ‘personal computers’ – and this guy’s put together a new kit version. Wow. [The latest kit went on ebay for $1750…]
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computer hacks
DIY HD Projector How-To
Part 5 of my DIY HD projector How-To is up over on Engadget. I’m still finishing it up, but I should wrap it up in part 6. I’ll probably make a better reflector mount, but the rest of it is coming along nicely.
Screen Saver Power Switching
This is another power control hack along the lines of the serial controlled power outlet. Instead of only managing a printer, [Brent] uses the IO lines of the parallel port to drive some SSRs in order to turn off all of his peripheral devices – think lamps, speakers, scanners, etc. He posted the whole thing over on instructables.
[Want to show off your skills? Send us a tip with your latest – or enter the Hackaday design challenge. I should have some more prizes to announce later this week. I’m just waiting for them to arrive.]
XBox HD-DVD-ROM On Mac And PC
HD-DVD drives are getting closer, but aren’t terribly easy to come buy – yet. [Dan] over at uneasy silence let us know that he cracked open an XBox 360 HD DVD Drive and plugged it into a windows box and a mac. With a light application of some drivers, they got the drive working pretty easily – the snag? You’ll need a mini-ata adapter if you want to mount it internally. (And there’s apparently no HD-DVD software support for mac… yet.)
[you can just use it as a USB drive.]
Make A Badass CNC Mill
Ben Heck and I got into converting a mill to be a CNC machine during our podcast interview. Today I found a pair of great write ups at balbots on modding the Harbor Freight mini mill that I mentioned. Part 1 get into all the details of converting the mill to use stepper motors, and adding a cooling system. Part 2 covers upgrading to DC servo motors and replacing the gears with a belt drive system.
Analog Video Synth
I’d call this more of a video mixer with audio inputs, but it’s an interesting way to hack video signals. [brian] sent in the VS001 Analogue Video Mixer. He noted that it’s along the same idea as the Mac SE/30 visualizer, but outputs VGA and can route signal through audio gear for even more interesting permutations. It looks like all the information is there if you want to build your own.
Serial Controlled Power Outlet
[Alan] sent me his simple rs-232 controlled power outlet. He built it to turn on his laser printer when a print job appeares in the queue. The relay is directly controlled by the DTR line on the serial port. Lots of espresso machine PID conversions use them to run boilers, so he could have avoided the extra mechanical relay. [I can’t pick on him too much, my old laserwriter is on all the time.]
He tied it together with some perl to turn on the printer and get the print job going once it’s had enough time to initialize.
