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Multiband Nixie VU Meter

June 13, 2008 by 4 Comments


This VU meter project by [Daniel Naito] is a great piece of Russian electrocouture. It’s made up of 14 Nixie tubes that display seven frequency bands for the two audio channels. He found this similar project, but wanted to keep the cost low by avoiding such exotic ICs. First, the two input channels are amplified and then split using seven bandpass filters covering 60, 150, 400, 1000, 2500, 6000, and 15000Hz. Then, the AC audio is converted to DC. The final stage converts the logarithmic scale to a linear output. Besides the semirare Nixie tubes, the majority of the parts are just cheap opamps and comparators. The post is an excellent read and you can see it in action in the video below.

UPDATE: Yep, it’s a repost. I’m awesome like that. The True RMS Plasma Vu-meter seems to be new to us though.

Continue reading “Multiband Nixie VU Meter” →

Wii Fit World Of Warcraft

June 13, 2008 by 12 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucEV7N0N9Pw&hl=en]
By now you’ve probably seen the video of two researchers from the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) navigating through maps on Google Earth by using the Wii Fit Balance Board. They’ve gone even further now by using the board to navigate World of Warcraft. It’s obvious that the board is usable with any 3D environment. The hack is entirely software based, as the board is completely unmodified. It relays data to a laptop via Bluetooth, where the pressure data in converted to directional instructions by their custom app written in C#. No notes on the project are available on DFKI’s site, but we’re betting they’ll release the software to the public once all the kinks are worked out.

[via Balance Board Blog]

Singing Tesla Coils

June 12, 2008 by 13 Comments


The video above is ArcAttack! playing the classic “Popcorn” through their signature Tesla coils. Solid state Tesla coils (SSTC) can generate sound using what [Ed Ward] calls pulse repetition frequency (PRF) modulation. The heat generated by the plasma flame causes rapid expansion of the surrounding air and a resulting soundwave. An SSTC can be operated at just about any frequency, so you just need to build a controller to handle it. The task is made more difficult because very few electronics are stable in such an intense EM field. [Ed] constructed a small Faraday cage for his microcontroller and used optical interconnects to deliver the signals to the Tesla coils.

[via Laughing Squid]

Consumer HMD Comparison

June 7, 2008 by 28 Comments


We’ve wanted headed mounted display technology to take hold for a long time. Gizmodo recently compared two consumer models: the Zeiss Cinemizer ($400) and the Myvu Crystal ($300). Unfortunately the resolution of HMDs has gone nowhere in the last 10 years. These two devices only support 640×480 and are aimed specifically at iPod users. With computers getting smaller and higher resolution, we’re surprised that HMDs have not followed suit. Why isn’t someone going to market with a 1280×720 headset? If you really must choose one of these two, we’d recommend the Myvu. It has composite input so you can hook almost anything up to it.

Wii Dual NAND Flash Hack

June 6, 2008 by 13 Comments


[ChipD] successfully installed two NAND flash chips into his Wii. He can keep the stock firmware on one and then flip a switch if he wants to boot using the other chip with a modified firmware. This hack is fairly straight forward. All it took was someone with steady hands to try it out. The new NAND chip is identical to the original and was salvaged from a flash drive. The chips were soldered as a stack except for the chip enable pin. The chip enable from each chip is attached to a small switch to toggle between which is active. You could use a TSOP socket to swap the different chips, but it wouldn’t fit inside the Wii case. This little switch could be hidden easily next to the GameCube ports.

DIY Slingbox

June 4, 2008 by 19 Comments


[David] took some interesting steps to put together his own Slingbox-ish setup. He used a Mac mini running Quicktime Broadcaster to capture the stream from a Firewire video camera which his cable/satellite receiver is plugged into. You’ll have to use an OS X machine, but that’s not too difficult these days. Broadcaster is about the simplest way to capture from Firewire and stream. We’re using it in our own office to multicast the signal from a Canadian satellite box.