If you’ve ever tried ironing laser printed paper to transfer the toner, you know that it can be slightly frustrating. [Dave] sent in an interesting twist on this method. The laser printer is used to print onto paper from a magazine and then the board and paper are both run through a laminating machine six or seven times. From the writeup, it looks like this technique works great. (You’ll probably need a printer with a manual feed tray to get it to print on the magazine paper)
Misc Hacks4117 Articles
Tom’s RGB Mood Lamp
[Tom] has been refining a board that drives a high power RGB LED for applications like this moodlight. It’s based around an ATmega8 microcontroller. The goal was to make an RGB LED easy to work with: It can cycle between colors in standalone mode. You can control it via a serial interface. It also has a pin header to hooking up three potentiometers for manual color mixing. Boards aren’t available yet, but he’s already posted a build tutorial. The board looks straightforward enough that it shouldn’t be too hard to layout if you really want to.
Server Access FAIL
Head over to The Daily WTF to find out about the building upgrade that made this data center only accessible from the handicap stall of the women’s restroom.
Tesla Coil Tuner
Here’s one more use for the insanely handy LM555 chips. [Terry] put together a Tesla coil tuner around one. The 555 is used to generate a range of frequencies while a simple double LED arrangement indicates the presence of an output spike from a coil due to the resonance.
Laser Surveillance Defeater
Imagine our chagrin when we first laid eyes on this “laser surveillance defeater.” It’s supposedly built to the security requirements of federal agencies. We don’t believe most government issue devices have exposed circuit boards or 9V batteries dangling from them. Laser surveillance works by bouncing the beam off of a room’s window. People speaking in the room cause the window to vibrate, which modulates the reflected laser beam. This device looks like it’s just a piezo buzzer meant to vibrate in vocal ranges. A quick search didn’t turn up any DIY projects, but it looks simple enough. Shomer-Tec would love you to purchase one for every window at $69 each. A small price to pay when you’re taking on people willing to spend $20.
[via Gizmodo]
Logicport Overview
As promised earlier, the Near Future Laboratory has published an overview of the Logicport Logic Analyzer. They’re using the Playstation 2 analysis as an example. The Logicport uses “interpreters” to define protocols. It has I2C/TWI, SPI, RS232, and CAN 2.0A/2.0B, but you can build your own interpreter based on these. You can specify bit order and the format you want the data in. Slave interpreters can be used for specific tasks: with the PS2 they were used to just show the fifth byte, which is the actual button press.
“Triggers” are used to signal specific activity. On the PS2, one was attached to the falling signal on the slave select line. This event means the master is about to start sending data.
The final area worth exploring is “measurements”. These can be frequency or arbitrary time intervals between events. The Logicport has multiple ground connections to eliminate noise from the signal and you’ll have to play with sample rate and logic level to get things running smooth. It’s nice to see how-tos written from the perspective of someone just getting started with the tool.
Air Hockey Robot
Don’t be ashamed, we suck at air hockey too. Luckily for us, we now have a robot opponent to blame or losing streak on. Engineers at Nuvation didn’t build this air hockey playing robot, they simply adapted a standard industrial robot arm for the task. It is controlled jointly by a ColdFire processor and a 9S08 microcontroller. An array of high power LEDs and a camera are positioned over the air hockey table, which captures the position of the puck. The robot reportedly wins 90% of its games, even against solid opponents. While this is more of project to show the power of ColdFire processors, we can’t help but think it will lead to a rash of unbeatable robot opponents. We’ve already been robo-owned at foosball; what’s next?
