[Ethan] sent in the online skill crane. It made it to shmoocon, but now it’s online for anyone to play. The machine is interfaced to the parallel port and controlled with a C program. It lacks a bit on the tech details, but you know you want one. Playing nets you a video of the results linked via email.
computer hacks1402 Articles
computer hacks
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.]
PCMCIA Modem Serial Port
[nickjohnson] sent in today’s hack. Mike removed the extraneous hardware, just leaving the UART on this IBM PCMCIA modem and replaced it with a SMD MAX241 ttl-rs232 converter. He added a new end to the original cable and ended up with a nice, finished PCMCIA serial port. That fine SMD soldering is hard to do. Impressive work.
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.
Wake On Lan Network Tester
[Jachin] sent in his network port tester built from a network card, wake on lan cable and a battery holder. Three AAs supply 4.5v DC just like the motherboard would to the card via the WOL cable. Nice trick, I’d consider adding a static bag at the least to keep the card from getting zapped.
