I’ve never trusted putting my PIN number at a store, and now I’m glad I don’t. In an effort to prove just how hackable those handy input terminals are, [saar drimmer] and [steven murdoch] replaced the guts of a pin terminal with… tetris. Hmm, now I need a gameboy tetris fix Thanks [terti]
A word of warning, the embedded video made Mozilla nutty on my usually rock solid machine.
Happy new year! I think we’ve covered the DIY CNC stuff a plenty, but I can’t resist posting this one. Remember the DIY snowboard? Recently, quite a few small quantity and home builders have cropped up. (I’m even planning to build my first board later this month.) [Mike Magruder] of happy monkey snowboards built a CNC gantry router just for cutting out wooden snowboard cores. The frame is built from structural aluminum (not cheap) with the usual steppers and some gecko drives running the show. The cable guide track and dust collector even make it look like a professional product. [Mike] also built a sweet press, but I’m going to be using vacuum bagging.
Remember the cheap tilt-shift lens? [Rodolfo] let me know about his set of modded Canon lenses on Flickr. The FD 50mm prime is pretty cheap off ebay – he removed the FD mount and uses it sans rear-end. We’ve seen a nicer version of this before. His macro lens caught my eye – it’s a combination of a cheap F/1.8 50mm and the handy, but cheap EF-S kit lens that comes with the Rebel XT series. (I might have to make one of those) Finally, we have the most original legal use for a Chinese lantern and duct tape that I’ve seen. It’s like the tilt shift, but the addition of the 50mm creates some interesting effects. Hit up wikipedia If you want to know more about the EF/EF-S mounts and adaptation issues.
USB LCD interfaces aren’t new around here. [John] sent this latest one. It uses a single ATMega chip and a few cheap components to implement the whole thing. The venerable HD44780 compatible is the text LCD of choice.
I’m on vacation at the moment, but I’ll start putting up some Hack-A-Day design challenge entries pretty soon.
[Jason] sent in a couple tips, and this diy oscilloscope caught my eye. This design uses the A/D sampler on the ATmega to generate the signal for presentation on a regular CRT television. The sample limit is less than 16khz. Not terribly impressive, but not too shabby either.
Alrighty, this is a pretty straight forward one. [Jason] discovered our tips line – he sent in quite a bit of stuff. I scored a pair of $120+ RC cars for $25 each recently, and this would come in handy. In fact, the store drone that checked me out didn’t believe that I could build my own speed controllers cheaper than they $30 units they had on the shelf. This R/C car speed controller uses a SMD pic 16F84 accepts standard servo input from a stock controller. It uses several fets to drive a motor at up to 40 amps. Everything you need, including eagle cad files is included in the zip file.
(I’m down in San Antonio this week – so far it’s been fun. I finally picked up a panavise junior and restocked my heat shrink and soldering supplies. )
We all remember the diy cnc laser. In my quest to bring you guys fresh stuff, I found an interesting design [archived page](the author says he built his in the 80s) for a home-built CO2 laser. The dimensions are missing, but the design is pretty simple. If you like some textbook style reading, the hyperphysics server is your friend. I finally bought a mini mill to go with my lathe – this could make an interesting machining project. Get a mini-fridge compressor to for the vacuum source, and the gas is easily acquired from the local welding shop. I’d bet Surplus shed probably has some workable optics.
The 25th is the deadline for the Design Challenge. Don’t freak out, just get it submitted before I get up on the 26th, and I’ll call it good.
