home entertainment hacks

770 Articles

M3 Headphone Amp

March 14, 2008 by 11 Comments


If you’re serious about your headphone amps, you probably already know about the M3 headphone amplifier. Instead of going for the extra tiny, they’re going the ‘screw the size, it’s all about the sound’ route. Thsi thing needs a 24v .5amp power supply. Boards are available, and the discussion has gotten so long on headwize that they exceeded the maximum thread length.

I got busy with the laser last night and came up with something new: a custom etched track pad. It still works, with a bit of added texture where I introduced it to the warm glow of the laser. Hit the link for pics and a walk through.

Cheap 360 Degree Head Tracking

February 9, 2008 by 10 Comments


[Joel] sent in his efforts to build an inexpensive 360 degree head tracking display. He’s using a Playstation six axis controller as the key to his helmet tracking system. The demo is short and to the point. He’s using the usual Glovepie driver to provide the software interface and what looks like off the shelf hardware on the helmet.

What really grabs my attention is the low cost of getting into VR now. Assuming that you own a computer, you can build your own VR setup for the cost of a Playstation controller and a cheap heads up display. (Remember these?)

SDI Mod Your DVD Player

January 4, 2008 by 7 Comments


I’m not usually into products, but I like this one. Remember this diy SDI DVD video out mod which lets you send high quality digital video over coax? Thanks to Pixel Magic, you can mod a variety of DVD players to add SDI thanks to the kit they’re offering. At a glance, bt.656 and bt.601 appear pretty similar, but the eval kit from the original only claims to be compatible with bt.601 while the Pixel Magic version is for bt.656.

DIY Home Theater Preamplifier

December 27, 2007 by 8 Comments


[Dane] built this excellent home theater pre-amplifier. He used [Mark Hennesy]’s pre-amp design to start with, and added selectable XLR, RCA, SPDIF and even USB audio inputs. Discrete inputs from his DVD player provide surround input, and an analog matrix creates 7.1 surround from the 5.1 input. The design is very elegant, and even uses a VFD display that appears blue with some filters. I usually just buy my HT gear, but projects like this make me seriously consider re-building my entire HT from scratch.

DDR Pacman (AKA DDR Pad Rewiring)

December 15, 2007 by 7 Comments


[Jason] sent in his low-tech, but interesting hack to allow the use of a DDR pad with his Gameboy advance to play PacMan. He took a $15 DDR pad, gutted it and wired directly to each of the foil pads that he wanted to use as buttons. For his project, he simply wired each pad directly to the DPad buttons on his Gameboy. It’s really a pre-manufactured version of [fbz] zone switches that she built for her backpack strap wifi detector.
By the way, [matt] over at Instructables wanted me to let you guys know that they’re giving away a $15k Versalaser.

Super8 Automatic Film Scanner

December 8, 2007 by 18 Comments


[edocronian] sent in this interesting mindstorm hack. [Harri] had several Super8 reels that he shot during the 80s. His kids put together this mindstorm NXT transport mechanism, and he did the rest with linux. The lego’s pull the reel across an Epson scanner, and some linux hacks run the scanner, identify the frames, and reconstruct the film. Unfortunately, [Harri] didn’t release any of the software hacks he used to pull it off.