Apple Remote Arduino Shield

November 3, 2009 by Mike Szczys 27 Comments

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[Computergeek] made an Arduino Shield in order to use it as an Apple remote. We like the construction technique that he used; taking perf-board and soldering the circuit and using stripped wire to interface with the pin sockets on the Arduino. He’s written the code needed to function as an Apple Remote but this shield has a lot more potential. This is an excellent opportunity to delve into the different IR protocols out there and create a universal remote for all of your random devices. We’d also want to give it a try as a TV-B-Gone.

The parts are easy to find or salvage without putting in an order. We’re not certain about his design, he should probably have invited a resistor to the party the two IR LEDs are having.

Medium Format Camera, From Scratch

November 2, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 9 Comments

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[Peter Johansson] has taken it upon himself to build a medium format camera, from scratch. We know this is a shock to some of you, but this camera uses traditional medium. There is no sensor. He will be loading it with (gasps) film. He bought the lenses pre made, but everything else is being constructed by himself. Probably the most notable parts are the aperture and the shutter. The project is about 80% complete right now. We can’t wait to see it finished.

[via Makezine]

Broken TV Brought To Life In LEGO Body

October 31, 2009 by Mike Szczys 21 Comments

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After letting it sit around for about 3 years, [Blake] decided it was time to fix his broken 15″ television. A little trouble shooting showed the problem was with the inverter. The backlight would come on for a few seconds, off for a few seconds, then repeat. By freeing the Magnavox 15MF400T from its metal case he got it working again, but couldn’t find the source of the short. His solution: build a new case out of non-conductive material. Voilà! We have the 15″ LEGO monitor.

It’s not a very complicated LEGO build, but it’s the first case mod we’ve seen in a long time that isn’t strictly gratuitous. Join us after the break for more pictures. Continue reading “Broken TV Brought To Life In LEGO Body” →

XBMC Running On ARM

October 30, 2009 by Mike Szczys 25 Comments

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The XBMC team has posted a teaser showing the current state of the ARM port of this popular open source media software. We’ve embedded it after the break where you can see the package boot up and playback HD video. In it we see that the system is decoding the signal well, but image rendering needs some tweaking before this will be ready.

The hardware used is a Beagleboard which runs a 600 MHz ARM processor, has OpenGL 2D/3D acceleration, puts out HD via a DVI port, and is selling for about $150. The 3″ by 3″ board can be connected to a network using a USB WiFi dongle. Although integrating XBMC by hacking TV firmware is a long way off, we’d consider velcroing one of these to the back of our HDTV and getting rid of the hulking PC behind the entertainment center.

Can’t wait for this version to hit a stable release and don’t mind using hardware that is just a bit bigger? Check out this guide for setting up XBMC on the $200 Acer Aspire Revo.

Continue reading “XBMC Running On ARM” →

Digital Tuner Reverse Engineering

October 27, 2009 by Mike Szczys 32 Comments

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Hackaday alum [Ian Lesnet] tipped us off about some reverse engineering of the HVR-1600, an analog and digital television encoder/tuner. The project was spawned when [Devin] noticed his Hauppauge HVR-1600 didn’t tune channels in Linux quite as well as it did in Windows. He had a hunch this was due to improper initialization settings for either the tuner chip or the demodulator.

To fix this he used two test points on the board to tap into the I2C bus. Using a logic analyzer he captured the command traffic from the bus while running Linux, then while running Windows. By filtering the results with a bit of Perl, and comparing them by using diff, he tracks down and finds the variation in the commands being sent by the two drivers. After a bit of poking around in the Linux source and making the necessary changes, he improved the tuning ability of the Linux package.

[Devin’s] work looks simple enough, and it is. The difficult part of this process is being smart enough to know what you’re looking for, and what you’ve got once you’ve found it.

Poddwatt: Tube Amp With Mp3 In Mind

October 23, 2009 by Mike Szczys 41 Comments

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[Bruce] has designed a push-pull tube amp that has enough gain to connect to a portable audio player. The design is closely related to his OddWatt offering from a few years ago. The new amp has many redesigned circuits and the new hardware choices drop the price tag of the parts by about $50.

This little wonder pumps out 5-7 watts and [Bruce] is please with the end result. It doesn’t put out quite as much low-end as the KT88 amp we saw last year, but compared to some other iPod speaker solutions this provides stellar audio.

Bouncy IPhone Controlled Dance Lights

October 21, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 19 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GmYcn8vb1U]

[John Boiles] introduces us to dimlet, his portable network controlled light dimmer. Inside the box is a fonera 2100 router that is running openWRT connected to an unnamed AVR microcontroller. Right now, he’s controlling the unit with his iPhone. It has three modes of control; a manual “slider” mode, an accelerometer controlled “dance” mode, and a programmable “tap” mode. You can download all the source code and schematics on his site.

[via Makezine]