Dry Ice Cannon

August 11, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 19 Comments

[Alexander] sent in his entry into a “creativity contest” at his university. He and some friends put together this dry ice cannon. Take note of the creative mechanism they used to mix the water with the dry ice. A large amount of gas is expelled as soon as the two begin to meet. If the gas is supposed to escape through the same opening, it is difficult to get all the material through. They have added a second opening just for the exhaust during mixing. Great job guys. How about some downloadable plans.

DOSbox On Zipit

August 10, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 19 Comments

poolrad (Custom)

Who out there has a Zipit? Great, now out of the five of you, who really wants to run Dos on it? Well, for the one or two of you left reading, now you can. The directions can be found here. [Hunter] has worked out a way to get DosBox running on his Zipit. At 315 mhz his old DOS games, like AD&D shown above, are running quite snappily. You can download everything you need to get up and running from the site. If DOS isn’t your thing, you may want to check out the Linux how to as well.

[thanks Harold]

Neo Geo Mini Arcade

August 9, 2009 by Eliot 20 Comments

neopocket

[Pocket Lucho], the builder of mini arcade cabinets, is back with another build. This time it’s a miniature Neo Geo arcade machine (translated). The build is very compact and neat. He attached the control panel and the PS one display using magnets to make the wiring more accessible. It has video out and second player input too. You’ll find an assembly video embedded below along with a trial run. Continue reading “Neo Geo Mini Arcade” →

Serial Hacking With An ATtiny2313

August 6, 2009 by Steve Watkins 19 Comments

board

[Sprite_tm] automated a portion of serial hacking by sniffing out the baud rate using an ATtiny2313 and FT232 breakout board. The firmware assumes 8 data bits, no parity, and 1 stop bit (8N1). This is pretty much defacto among serial ports so it should work well, though some devices do use different settings. The auto detection routine can sniff rates as low as 110 baud and supports non standard rates. Released under GPLv3, the software is also supplied in hex format. [Sprite_tm] has provided great project in past such as Working with VFDs, Controllable bristlebot, and AVR boost converter. Additional information regarding serial hacking after the break.

Continue reading “Serial Hacking With An ATtiny2313” →

BPSK On 433 MHz European ISM Band

August 3, 2009 by Steve Watkins 10 Comments

main

[WaveRider] is using a type of phase shift keying called BPSK to transmit digital sound and video for remote telemetry. Though a higher signal to noise ratio (SNR) is generally sought after with communications, legal limitations are imposed on total radiated power. To balance the two headed beast, he opted out on frequency shift keying due to binary shift keying’s ability to work with lower SNR. This adds the difficulty of properly reconstructing the digital signal at the receiver. A PLL based carrier regeneration circuit is used to reconstruct the signal. Using the Rabit2000 processor as the host controller on both transmitter and receiver, 96KB/Sec serial data is obtained. On the other side of the spectrum is the Homemade regenerative tube radio.

1-Wire HVAC Monitoring System

July 29, 2009 by Steve Watkins 10 Comments

1-wire hvac control

The 1-Wire HVAC monitoring system is for residential Geothermal HVAC systems. This project utilizes the so called 1-wire temperature sensor. A single board computer handles the brunt of the work including web accessible trend data. With access to the underling temperatures, the over all system performance may be gauged. Earlier this year we covered a HVAC web enabled monitor that adds an element of control. As the industry adopts modern control architectures, we hope to see more HVAC hacks around.

Music Visualizer (oscilloscope)

July 29, 2009 by Steve Watkins 21 Comments

musicscopetv

The Music visualizer is actually a second build based on an earlier design[Thanks Roger]. The build was influenced by Zyra’s How to make an oscilloscope out of a television. The hack is quite simple, patch the output of an amplifier into the vertical deflection coils of the CRT. This is a good use for that old TV you may have laying around but don’t want to recycle it just yet. While on the subject we had covered the Mac SE/30 audio visualizer in 2006. For those looking for something a little more hard core, here is a bit about Homemade cathode ray tubes.