Thereifixedit.com is a site filled with dubious innovations. Some of them are cool, some of them are clever, and most of them are terrifying. Anyone who has ever stood in front of a broken household appliance with a roll of duct tape, one screw driver with a bit chipped off the flat part, and determination will laugh themselves silly browsing through this site. Maybe some of the ghetto hacks we covered before should be in this list.
[Thanks for the link Dad]
[Jenn’s] family is a single-car household. Because of this, it’s a little more difficult to get a jump start when the headlights run down the battery. Not wanting to ask the neighbors for help, her husband [Richard] decided to come up with his own solution.
Rummaging through the parts on hand, [Richard] went with his old friend Sonic the Hedgehog. He used two 12-volt, 1 amp Sega Genesis power adapters in parallel hooked up to a 12 volt, 3 amp power supply. The end result is a 12-volt 5 amp source hooked to the car’s electrical system and used to get their road machine started.
We have enjoyed some of [Richard’s] offerings in the past, such as Super Nintoaster and the Super Genintari but this is a bit less… eloquent. A few questions do come to mind. First of all, is this the best way to use parts of your 20-year-old gaming system? How many amps does your average car starter pull down? And finally, what kind of issues are we looking at with the lead acid battery under these conditions? Weigh in on the conversation in the comments.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP_RhEstx_c]
Hacking is all about using parts and resources in an unconventional way. If stringing a pair of high-rise cranes with LED Christmas lights and making them move to a piece of classical music isn’t unconventional, then we don’t know what is. For nearly a quarter of every hour last night, 2 crane operators, along with two ‘choreographers’, swung and spun the cranes around in a coordinated fashion. The project was created by [Brandon Vickerd] as part of Nuit Blanche. Its purpose was to showcase the technology that builds the cities we live in. A live video stream from various viewpoints was projected on site, below the cranes.
[Tyler] has had his electrochemical machining hack up for a while now. His final version uses a pump to move electrolyte out through the etching head and onto the workpiece. This keeps fresh electrolyte in the etching region and clears out the insoluble material. We see how this could be attached to a CNC system and used to etch PCBs without the use of a special inkjet printer, toner transfer, or laser etching machine.
[thanks Ian]
A new operating system, code named Barrelfish is being developed by Microsoft research labs and ETH Zurich in Switzerland. This operating system is being built with multi core operations foremost in priority. It is supposed to be extremely scalable and able to function on a very wide range of hardware. You can download the current snapshot of it on their site and dig into the source code, released under a 3-clause BSD style license. If you would like to learn the primary differences between this OS and Windows or Linux, you can read this PDF.
[via Engadget]
One of the best parts of building a coil gun is seeing just how fast you can get that slug to move through the air. [Daniel] built this speed meter to be able to see exactly that. It is comprised of two optical sensors, one at each end of a barrel. As the projectile passes them, its speed is calculated using an Atmega16. Since the distance between the sensors is pre determined, its only some simple math to figure out the speed of an object passing between them. The result is then displayed on a nice looking blue LCD.
If the blue accent lighting and acrylic stylings look familiar, that’s because we’ve seen [Daniel] before. He’s the one that built the portable coil pistol.
[via HackedGadgets]
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/6803291%5D
We’ve recently been getting a lot of new comments on our Bokode post from a while back, and with good reason. [M@] has managed to find a way to replicate Bokode at home, using $0 worth of equipment (before the price of microprint). To accomplish Bokode at home, it seems all you need is and old webcam lens assembly and an LED. Of course the his version is not as thin as a regular barcode so it probably wont be replacing anything in the near future, but the concept of from MIT to home within such a short period of time is amazing.
