I’ve been searching for a particular old school hack and ran across this little gem. I don’t know why I’m so intrigued by tube amps.. the high voltage, the glow, the power – oh yeah, never-mind. One of the most expensive parts of a tube amp is the transformer. They scored a pair of mono-block amps and walk us through replacing virtually every part except the transformers. My problem? I need at least 6.
home entertainment hacks796 Articles
SMS VCR Remote
You guys love those erricson phones. Mark sent in this SMS VCR remote control. I guess it’s an alternative to a TiVo, or handy for those one man sting operations. I started poking around the site and discovered a few more interesting projects. The toilet telemetry was a bit odd. I want the duck taped kitchen timer for my espresso bar.
XBox 360… Laptop
I’m posting this a little early because it’s gonna be popular. Ben Heckendorn has been up to his tricks again. This time he built a 14 pound, water cooled 17 inch XBox 360 aluminum cased laptop. It’s got all the outputs you could ever need. This one is very good. He was kind enough to write up the build and do a nice photo shoot. Oh, this is very, very nice.
[Update: Skyler] set up a mirror.]
Hd Mirror Projector Fix
John Sullivan’s projector suffered some unplanned damage. The mirror inside the projector that reflects light from the bulb was broken, rendering the unit useless. The mirror was an odd shape, so he cut up a platter from a sacrificial hard drive and made a replacement. If you’re looking for other projects for those old drives, I dug up a few. The hd motor anomemeter is interesting. The brushless motor can be used to generate AC current to calculate the speed.
[Hopefully comments will be back this week. I’ll get into the details when it’s fixed.]
Chumby
The biggest hacker news of the weekend has to be Chumby being revealed. We heard whisperings of this at Defcon, but the device has finally been seen in the flesh at Foo Camp. Chumby is an open hardware flash player. That’s just a starting point though. Chumby is designed to be hacked. Even though they aren’t selling hardware yet, they’ve already posted full schematics and software notes (create an account to view). The device comes with a dongle for further expansion. Christine.net, Dyl World, and ScottJanousek all have posts covering the device. Friend of Hack-A-Day, bunnie did the hardware design and posted shots of the board on his blog. We’re planning on getting a good look at the device when Fabienne, Will, and I are at Toorcon in San Diego next month.
Bent NES Visualizer
Circuit bending is becoming a regular around here. [emdy] sent in Phillip Stearns bent NES project. It’s modified to produce visual output based on sound input. I think that the bent Texas Instruments T199 is even more worthy. Nice.
SDI Video-out Mod
SDI (Serial Digital Interface) is a digital video over coax standard with up to 540Mbs of bandwidth. For now it’s only found on high-end a/v hardware. Retired broadcast engineer Robert Cobler hacked a SDI interface into his his satellite reciever and Danny Mavromatis did his DVD changer for the ultimate in digital video quality. Robert built the ‘Poor Mans SDI‘ to show that SDI doesn’t need to be expensive. He interfaced a National CLC020 to the Bt865 video chip and added some logic hardware to impliment the required SAV/EAV signals. If you’ve got the right video chip(with the right clock), you can use the evaluation kit to make your own. Check out danny’s blog entry for a beautiful screen capture.
[Update: The DVD mod is by Danny Mavromatis – Robert wrote up the satellite mod on AVSforum – Thanks Scott]
