I’m attending the funeral of my best friend’s father today. As a mechanical engineer, I always admired the man as an excellent machinist. What follows is a post I wrote last year about his gas powered blender. You’ll be sorely missed Mr. Frost.

My roommate Frosty has often joked about how many lawnmowers and weedeaters his dad has laying around. It seems that his dad has decided to take care of the clutter and I, for one, am scared. Yes my friends, a gas powered blender. It has been done before, but you’ve got to respect Greg’s scratch building prowess. Finally you can vaporize ice in mere seconds and with the way the handle bars are mounted it’s guaranteed to make the goofying process far more intimate than usual. By my count this means he still has four more engines in the garage; I don’t know what’s next, but god help us all.

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Here’s a pretty rough project for cutting records out of acrylic. It uses a standard turntable for the base. The carving head is a chisel shaped needle attached to a small speaker. Speaker movement is translated into needle vibrations. The head is hand cranked across the surface of the record. The final addition to the system is a vacuum hose to remove the acrylic threads. I wish they would have spent more time taking pictures of this thing than making flash animations.

[thanks vennox]

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U-Verse is AT&T’s fiber IPTV service. No matter how many set top boxes you have in your household AT&T limits the number of DVRs to just one. So, what hardcore countermeasure did they employ to lock down their users? They unplugged the hard drive! No. Really. You don’t even have to look at this article by Hack-A-Day reader [Chad Brantly]; just unscrew the the cover, plug the drive in, and you’re done.

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I always enjoy hackers who build items that have been mass produced for years. Take Charles Altmann’s DIY Turntable. Audiophiles would have to pay an arm and a leg to get something this unique. The base and platter are made from stacks of plywood. The spindle is a Harley-Davidson Shovelhead intake valve and guide. The motor drive is actually a stepper motor. Precision speed control is provided by computer generated sine waves. His homebuilt tonearm was what got him interested in building the entire table.

[thanks bp]

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[larspontoppidan] has an extremely cheap DVD player. It doesn’t work too bad for movies and he liked using it as a CD player. The only problem is the idiotic front panel: a play button that points left, a stop button that points right. Who does that? Lars decided to use an ATMega48 to fix the ridiculous buttons and to interpret commands from his Technics remote. The MCU takes the input from the buttons or remote and then issues the correct IR sequence for the DVD player. He’s got a detailed write up and even covers the initial decoding of IR commands from the original remote. Lars throws in a silly Apple style “breathing” LED hack as well.

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Scienceprog has posted how-to build a DTMF tone detector. DTMF are the standard sounds used in tone dialing. Plugging this circuit into your phone line you can decode the all the tones on the line back into their original number form. This would be useful for issuing commands to a home automation system or any other device that you wanted dial-in access to.

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Ben loved using his Squeezebox music streamer, but every time the phone rang he would have to pause the music. Once the phone call was complete he wouldn’t remember to start the music again. He decided to automate the entire process. His circuit is a combination of a couple different circuits he found online: a ring detector, an on/off hook detector, and an audio interface. Most of his article details how caller ID signals are encoded and how he decodes them. Now whenever the phone rings the music is automatically paused. Between rings the Squeezebox announces who is calling. When the phone is placed back on the hook the music automatically starts again.

Continue reading “Squeezebox Audible Caller ID” →