This one wins my vote for unintended use of hardware. [nathan] sent in his bent modem. His breakout box takes midi signals in and uses them to generate various modem sounds from an old Packard Bell external modem. Now, how about some schematics? Hit the link for videos of it in use.
Misc Hacks4086 Articles
Quickie: Hack-A-Day On G4TV
Thanks to [Ryan Bucshon] for letting me know that Hack-A-Day is up on Attack of the Show tonight. Looks like they’re talking about the Wii Laptop by Ben. Hit it right now.
Update: Excellent, I got mentioned, Hack-A-Day got direct coverage, then they hit Ben’s site, and mentioned Ben’s How-To series on Engadget.
Reactable: Visual, Interactive Synth
[imajes] brought this sweet project to my attention. The table is reactive thanks to the combination of a projector and a video camera below the surface. The position and unique pattern of each block on the table is used to manipulate the operations of the synth. The software is open source – so you can build your own. (And it’ll run on linux, mac and windows) Check out the videos for a good demonstration. I’m thinking that one of these could be built on a budget using lumenlab/overhead LCD technology.
Cheap 1 Hz Clock Source
[Alberto] sent this along. [Jose Pino] put up a nice how-to on modifying a cheap quartz clock to be used as a 1Hz (1 second) pulse generator. I can think of a number of past projects where this would have been really friggin’ handy.
Tesla Powered Sauron’s Eye
[Peter] sent in his latest Tesla coil experiment. He calls it the “Eye of Sauron” effect. It was created by adding a rotating breakout to an already powerful Tesla coil. It isn’t quite the same as the old evil eye of Tolkien’s dreams, the picture is a 22 second exposure of two rotations of the 7 foot aluminum tube.
Build Your Own ECG Heart Monitor
Our own Hack-A-Day emeritus took some time out from his showgirl pursuits to pass this along. The ECG was built to pad a resume, but it doesn’t make it less useful. Be warned, too much power could stop your heart. If you build one, triple check everything before wiring yourself up. Basically, an electrical differential is generated by the contraction of muscles in the heart. This slight signal is amplified by an op-amp and sampled with an A/D converter.
RS-232 Serial Laser Link
[ashish] sent in this one via the tips line. (Ed Note: link rot. Try this one.) It’s a project to create a laser based RS-232 link. It’s based on cheap laser pointers, a MAX232 and a photo-resistor to receive the signal.
