[Luhan] built this PIC controlled roach motel. It’s the first micro-controller project that I’ve seen devoted to exterminating a member of the insect world. A PIC 16F675 is used to generate 10 pulses at 400 volts per second. Crispy.
Misc Hacks4178 Articles
Great Intro To Surface Mount Soldering
[Scott] sent in his video how-to on surface mount soldering. The macro video quality is excellent, and the demo is great even if you’re already into SMD work. Everything can be done with fine solder, a decent soldering station, tweezers, a 10x loupe and a good selection of flux. I’ve managed quite a bit of SMD work without external flux, but this sort of demo shows just how effective it is.
How To Make A Vacuum Tube
[marco] sent in this video (scroll down) showing how to make a vacuum tube by hand. The page and captions are in french, but it’s pretty interesting to watch. A small spot welder, some fairly basic glass working tools and a vacuum generator are required, but the technology is definitely within reach for the dedicated hardware hacker.
Nixie Counter Clock
[lerneaen hydra] sent in his version of the ubiquitous nixie clock. Rather than gut his counter for the tubes, he used an Atmel Mega88 to pulse the clock to display the time. Additionally, the LED matrix on the case outputs the time in binary. His past projects are worth checking out. He milled the case on his converted CNC mill, retrofitted an old CNC lathe and seems to enjoy putting supercaps in everything (including his clock).
24C3 Hacking DNA
[Drew Endy]’s Programming DNA talk was by far the most interesting talk we saw at Chaos Communication Congress. No, DNA doesn’t have much to do with computers, but he points out that hacking principles can be applied just the same. Right now engineers are reversing genetic code and compiling building blocks for creating completely arbitrary organisms. This talk was designed to bootstrap the hacking community so that we can start using and contributing standard biological parts to an open source collection of genetic functions.
You should definitely watch the video to get a good idea of where biohacking is at today. You can find a higher quality version of the video in the archives.
DIY Rotomolding
Rotomolding is used to create hollow forms by slowing rotating a mold while the material covers and hardens to the shape of the mold. [ds] built this version using a stepper motor to drive the assembly and a belt drive link An extreme version is used to form whitewater kayaks and other plastics. This thread over at cnczone has a rotisserie oven version that looks ideal for small plastic or wax molding.
Happy New Year Extra
Goodbye 1167627600 –1199167140 1199163540.
[Justin] is having fun telling everyone that an exploit has been found for the Archos 605 media player. The hack gets you remote root access on the player… need I say more?
[Gene] sent in his polar coordinate based LEGO 3d printer. He’s still working on the driver end, but it’s an interesting project.
[Kyle] sent in the gutting of his flip video camera.
Need some new storage? [forrest] sent in his price/GB price comparison script. It scrapes New Egg and graphs out the results.
Despite the link on our old post being dead, [Txoof] built his own CCFL macro light from a dead laptop LCD.
[Dan] sent in his LED cube matrix. The LEDs are wired in a matrix, so he can actually address them individually.
