Happy Halloween Extra


[Update: pumpkin carved by Team Hack-A-Day member mastershake916]

We’ve got plenty of tricks around here, and I’ve got a treat coming up – you’ll hear about it in the next podcast.

[Ronald Schaten] sent me his USB LED fader. ATMega, PWM lit LEDs, he uses it to indicate status on his pvr.

[computerguru365] sent in his cell phone car charger turned USB cable

[steve] sent in this over the top C64DTV mod.

[Everett] sent along his button activated PSP shoulder lighting.Nice tiny soldering work for that on.

[Jorge] sent in his friends latest junk art metal lathe. Not an easy thing to build – Nice!

[gijs] sent me this crazy bent Casio SK-1. We’ve had a few of these on Hackaday before.

[seniorcheez] sent in his iPod shuffle dock with integrated power and tunecast.

Thinkpad Style Keyboard Light


[Sprite_tm] keeps coming up with nice work. This time he sent in his thinkpad style keyboard LED lighting solution for his toughbook. I know, you’re thinking… ‘it’s a LED…’ He used an ATtiny13 to monitor the caps lock LED. If it’s operated two times in succession, the LED is turned on and off. Nice, clean and effective.

[By the way, Part 2 of my diy projector how-to is up on engadget. Look for part 3 later Tuesday.]

Thursday Mini-extra

[Russ] sent in his Great Pumpkin computer case mod. (Non-biodegradable)

[Nuke] sent in his $10 ipod dock. It makes me think of doom for some reason.

[phnx] sent in this amusing case mod.

These have been around, but they’re excellent, so deal. Evilmadscientist.com has a couple of great pumpkins.
Check out the Cylon Jackolantern and the R/C Dalek Pumpkin

[Daedalus] sent in this one – adsl via sound card. 96kbs. The sound card is interfaced
with an audio transformer to the line at each end.

And this one just came in from [Eric]. Make a magsafe connector for thinkpads! Awesome.

Environmental Monitoring


[Daniel Klien] sent me his thermd environmental monitoring project. It’s written in perl, but the cool part is the sheer number of supported devices. It’s pretty rare when a single developer is given test hardware so he can add support for it.

Sure, this isn’t a hardware hack, but temperature logging is one of those irritating problems of hardware hacking. I’ve got loads of uses for it – coffee roasting, house management, battery charging, monitoring for my EV motorcycle project.