Remember [John]’s Halloween laser tracking game? He’s been busy since then. After building his own version of multi-player missile command based on his laser interaction game, he added head tracking (using the same method as [Johnny Lee] . Check out the video after the break, and grab the full source for Mac or Linux.
home entertainment hacks779 Articles
Recycle Those Old RF Modulators
[Shadow] sent in this handy idea. For many, it’s sort of a captain obvious hack, but I’m hoping that this might keep a few of these things out of the trash. He needed to send video around the house from a media PC, and happened to have an old XBox RF modulator sitting around. He popped it apart and located the audio and composite video inputs. To get the signal to the rest of the house, he plans on installing a distribution amplifier that’ll amplify and split the signal to each TV set.
M3 Headphone Amp
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
[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?)
Sound Input For Cheap Video Cams
I’ve been trying to find an excuse to pick up one of the HD Aiptek cams for a while now. [windowlikker] posted his simple pre-amp + external audio input mod for his Aiptek AHD videocam. Unfortunately, the mod is limited to mono input unless there’s an un-used stereo input on the encoder board.
SDI Mod Your DVD Player
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
[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.
