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.]
Here’s part 2 of my interview with Ben. (Or just grab it via the feed) We answer some more questions and go off on a few tangents about cnc machines, the PS3 and part sources. It cuts directly to the interview – I don’t want to wait 6 hours to record it. I should have a regular podcast up in the next day or two.
[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.
TiVo left the external SATA port on the series three disabled. [Lightrunner] bypassed this silly restriction by adding a sata to esata cable (AFAIK the only difference is the shape of the connector and shielding on the cable.) and a nice big SATA RAID array. Silly TiVo, massive recording storage is for everyone.
My latest how-to is up over on engadget – I’m writing up my build of a HD projector – This one features DVI-D with HDCP support along with component, VGA and on board tuner. This is one of those projects where you can make all sorts of compromises, but I’ve gone all out on the hardware. Pro lenses, electronic ballast, 6500k lamp… If you’ve been considering building one of these, you should check it out. When it’s done I’ll give it a good going over – is the picture quality worth the effort? Peace of mind at using a $50 lamp instead of a $300 one?
Kurtis Berry sent in his response to all the ipod speaker docks out there. Instead of buying one, he built one. It’s really a combination of several projects, and it looks great. He used a monoblock tube amp kit to provide 8 watts of excitement to a well known diy speaker design, all encased in oak. He’s hit that wall we all know – that point where we quit because it’s working so nicely as it is. Still, I’m not sure that adding a second channel would add too much to the sound experience with his speaker unless he wants to build a matched set. (I can’t give him too much grief, I’m jealous.)
Storage element keychain. Allright, it’s cool, but almost criminal.
Hack a wireless doorbell into a remote relay. It’s allright, but I like the Mr. House + APRS tracking better.
[Josh and PsychoRNGD] both sent in the mindstorm NXT laser hack (Replace the LED in a light unit with a laser pointer diode)
Matt sent along his XBox 180. I dig it just because it gets rid of all those friggin wires.
[XanTium] points out that MS’s latest drive in the 360 takes things to a few extremes to block firmware hacking.
[Mike] let us know that after all the grief he got here, he built an aux to female ipod cable for his sound-dock. (He got his femal ipod connector from Ridax, but Sparkfun now carries a surface mount version)
You guys sent in some great tips this week. Keep em comin. I’ve been busy, but I’m going to hunt down the floating ads and get them taken care of.
