I was doing some project window shopping today, and FPGA’s came up on my list. [John Kent] put together a pretty impressive documentation set. He’s written up some of his own projects, some how-to’s and linked plenty of good information for the budding FPGA programmer.
Misc Hacks4117 Articles
9V Battery As A Project Case
I stumbled on [Carlos]’ blog while I was hunting for Arduino ideas. This simple IR detector caught my eye – not for the project, but for the project case. He stuffed his IR detector inside an old 9V battery case. The TSA probably won’t like it, but it’s a fantastic idea for those smaller projects.
Urban Sound Experience
[Christiane] sent in a project prepared at the University of Applied Sciences in Würzburg/Germany. The idea is to experience urban sounds at various heights in a variety of cities. As feet are detected on a step, the experience changes to simulate an increase in altitude. A pair of surround sound headphones, some proximity sensors, an Arduino and instantaudio make everything work.
Simple Digital Camera Spectroscope
[JC Doré] sent in this [english] interesting optics hack. The rubber grips are made from an old mouse pad, the springs for the clip were salvaged from zip drive floppy discs. A pair of old photo slide frames sandwich a diffraction grating slide. (Like this one) This simple mod allows the slide to be mounted to most cell phones, turning them into digital spectrometers.
Lego NXT Cnc Mill
[btopley] built his own micro mill out of Lego NXT parts. The construction details are a bit light, but it looks like a great way to try things out without all the actual machine work.
CNC Mini-lathe
Given my obsession of CNC projects, I’m surprised that we haven’t mentioned this project before. [Dave] put together an excellent site about his CNC converted mini-lathe. (The same on that I’ve got) He built a pretty simple stepper controller to drive it. Since the lathe only needed two axis motors, he drove the steppers with some mosfets that he triggered from a parallel port. The site has been around for a while, but I thought you guys would enjoy a classic hack like this one.
D200 Hotshoe GPS Redux (el Cheapo Version)
It’s been a while since we talked about putting a GPS on top of a D200. [Rick] sent in his latest version. He used a nice 20 channel sirf III gps from spark-fun, a cheap D200 remote cable and a few parts to send the NMEA sentences down the wire. The biggest improvements include taking the $100 Nikon cable out of the mix and swiping power from the camera for the GPS board. All the info is there, but I had to seriously stare at his wiring instructions for a while despite the low parts count. I like to see actual circuit diagrams!
