[Benjamin] sent in the craziest thing I’ve seen lately. He’s using the magnetic pickup in his electric guitar to sense IR signals. The guitar is hooked to a preamp that’s feeding into his computer. By capturing the pulses with something like audacity, you can grab samples of the codes without building any specialized hardware.
If you’ve got something for Hack-A-Day, use the tips line!
Apparently our Russian brethren have some issues ordering things online. Their shipping solution? A bit of remote social engineering. Thanks to the nature of Russian addresses – that is, the language is pretty easy to recognize – they’ve found that putting down their address in Russia along with a Canadian zip code will usually result in the package being forwarded along thanks to the thoughtful Canadian postal workers. Thanks [Jock]
Social engineering not your thing? OK, well here’s a few extra hacks to chew on. [Sam] thinks you should wrap your electronics in a condom to keep em dry. If you’re in NY, you might want to check out the circuit bending festival. Oh, and if you’ve had your head in the sand, you might have missed the steam powered R2D2.
If you’ve been amused by the lengths people go through to speak to a serial device these days. [timmeh] just took the cake. He build his own frikkin’ tiny RS-232 to USB interface with the diminutive SIL CP2101. The package on it is QFN-28 (If PLCC is Darth Vader, QFN-28 is his mean little brother.) That said, if you prefer to work with stuff that talks TTL or RS-232, this could be a handy add-on to pop a USB port on your project. (Oh, look, they have samples…) Sure, we’ve beaten the serial connections to death, but they’re so handy we just can’t resist. It may be a decent way to add a serial port to your laptop. (Picture this: dell’s bluetooth cards are usb devices – you could add one of these without even voiding your warranty.)
[Marcus] sent in his rather interesting g-force logger. He’s posted most of the bits, but hasn’t quite released all the info you’d need to build your own. The most interesting part is the video camera time sync. He used a SD development board for the data logging along with an accelerometer to produce the data. The latest version features selectable internal and external sensors and decent size reduction. I’d like to see something like this combined with a high sensitivity GPS sensor to record skydiving or hangliding.
[Alexander] sent in his instructable on upgrading the inefficient linear regulator in a DX3 RC radio transmitter to double the battery life. I’m actually more interested in the switching regulator (high res image) than the radio – this could be really useful. $15 to replace a $1 component hurts a bit – but it has the caps and coil needed to support the switching regulator.
[Doug] sent in his DTVii project. (It’s on earthlink, so here’s the coralcache) You can also find updates in his forum posts. He modded the ever popular DTV C64 with an expansion bay for this, keyboard input and future mods. Then he built a RF joystick complete with accelerometer joystick emulation mode.
You can hit the user demo video is after the break.
Continue reading “DTVii: C64 Wireless Tilt Accelerometer Joystick”
One of my weird google searches turned up this little project. Looks like the big images are broken on the site, but all the important files actually exist. [Doria] combined a window shade with solar power and EL cells to create one hacked window shade. It’ll charge up during the day and the EL cells that cover it can be activated day or night to give your room that extra funky glow.
