While waiting for his clothes to dry, our reader [xaio] decided to poke around and see how his building’s coin laundry system worked. It turned out to be ridiculously simple. All he needed to do was jumper the cable coming from each machine and they’d run without issue. We wonder why the relay box is so big. In any event, it could certainly benefit from a more secure installation.
[Andlier] sent us this cool little project. He has built a wireless accelerometer controlled RGB LED lighting system. Based on what a mouth full that is, it sounds complicated right? The end result looks fairly intuitive. Simply pick up the controller and tilt your hand to change the color of the light.
The controller consists of an Atmel AVR168 microcontroller. He doesn’t specify what transceiver he is using, but if you look in the comments, he notes that he added an antenna to it to extend the range. The part that controls the LED is based off of an Atmel AVR169 microcontroller hooked to some shiftbright LED modules.
Continue reading “Wireless Accelerometer Controlled RGB LED”
We were surprised the last time [Ben Heck] was building a Xbox 360 laptop, yet here’s another one. Well, it’s not a laptop exactly, but an Xbox 360 built inside of a Pelican case. After receiving several requests for a similar device for people stationed overseas, he finally decided to try it out. The goal is to get all the components into the case so that the watertight seals are intact. It’s only partially complete right now and he notes that one of the major hurdles will be converting the DVD drive to top loading. The light ring and USB ports will probably be moved to the top surface, and the hard drive will be made removable. We look forward to the final writeup since there aren’t many tutorials on working with Pelican cases.
Movea has just released a version of Gyration’s wireless remote control for Windows Media Center computers. Other than the wireless mouse controls that the remote offers, one nice feature of the remote is the ability to control Windows Media Player (WMP) while your display is off.
The remote interacts with WMP, by downloading data to be displayed using it’s built in LCD screen. From here you can view songs by album or artist and even access your playlist. Prices for the remote range from $179.99 to $229.99 with an included keyboard.
After a little searching we found that Gyration had made a similar version of the remote for Dell that was packaged with the Dell XPS M2010 Based on this and a thread by [BENZONATE] on AVS Forum we put together our own remote using the following parts: Continue reading “How To: Build Your Own Gyration Media Center Remote”
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Boxee, the social XBMC, is now easy to install on your Apple TV. We first covered Boxee in June when the alpha was released. It’s great to see how much the project has advanced to this point. To install on the Apple TV, you first download a USB “patchstick” creator. The program puts a mac partition on the drive and copies over the necessary files. You reboot the Apple TV with the stick installed and it patches in both Boxee and XBMC. When you restart the the device it will have two new menu items and the rest of the system will be intact. [Dave Mathews] shows the entire process in the video above. He notes that they’re currently not taking advantage of the GPU, so 1080p is a little too much for the system.
If you weren’t looking forward to trying to find a NES Four Score just to rip connectors out of it or were reluctant to cut the ends off your NES controllers and use different connectors for your NES hack, you’re in luck. Parallax has released an NES controller connector (7-pin, male) that is compatible with the Nintendo controller. They also provide the socket pinout. It’s interesting to see a product like this come out so long after the original console, a testament to the popularity.
[via Make]
Want to get a bigger tv but can’t afford it? If you Have a rear projection TV, why not just get a bigger screen? That’s exactly what was done here. They dismantled the old TV, mounted it and enclosed it theater style, with curtains. They then mounted a new screen in front of it and voala, bigger TV. He doesn’t talk about how much brightness was lost, but there had to be some. The final picture looks great.
[thanks BonMul]
