Misc Hacks

4182 Articles

Reubens Tube: Fire Sound Visualization

June 25, 2007 by 24 Comments


[vbrtrmn] sent in the most fun I’ve seen with fire lately. It’s really just a geeky physics demonstration, but it’s awesome. That’s a foil lined pvc pipe with holes every half inch. Propane is feeding from one side and there’s a 2″ speaker on the opposite end. You can visit the link for the video, or just see it after the break.

Remember: PVC won’t handle that sort of heat for long, and it’ll emit some nasty fumes. In fact, don’t try to make your own unless you can draw the propane molecule without using google.

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Automatic Cable Modem Power Cycling

June 22, 2007 by 21 Comments


If you’ve got a cable modem, you know the drill when it goes offline. Unplug it, wait 30 seconds, plug it back in, reset your dhcp request. I’m pretty sure that [brian] mentioned this in a comment a while back, but now he’s written it up. He’s using a cron job on his linux box to check the internet connection, and if the test fails, power cycle the hardware with some X10 hardware and a little scripting. (Just don’t tell your friends or they’ll be outside trying to guess the code.)

Dammit We Missed A Day Extra

June 19, 2007 by 14 Comments


I finally ponied up for an ev-do card to make sure that I have no excuse for missing a post short of being trapped in a hole by bizzaro superman.

Check out this short video how-to on making your own glow in the dark inkjet ink. via [boing boing]. Probably the best inkjet mod since the diy cd printer.

If you remember the diy ups, you might like the attach a giant battery to a stock ups version. I did this myself years ago. It works well, but use a maintenance free battery to minimize hydrogen off-gassing. In fact, I’d suggest some proper ventilation for the battery pack. Miata batteries have a vent tube if you want to keep the parts count to a minimum. (but they are a bit pricy)

Something a little oldschool – [Alexandre] added a serial port to his newton message pad 2000.(Not in english, but easy enough to understand.)

After seeing the superglue fingerprinting post, [Anton] sent in this fingerprint falsification how-to from the ccc.

Handy Bench PSU’s

June 17, 2007 by 11 Comments


I thought everyone was going with cheap PC based power supplies(I did), but some people just have to take it to another level. [andrew] built this bench PSU with -12V, -15V, +5V, +12V, +15V, variable and one +35VDC unregulated output. He based it on this design, but added a few tweaks of his own.
Yes, Hack-A-Day took a bit of an unplanned hiatus on Saturday, but I’ll have some extra stuff for you this week as things return to normal. If you’ve got something interesting, use the tips line.

DIY Digital Voice Transceiver

June 14, 2007 by 12 Comments


[dk] sent in the DVX project. It’s a complete D-STAR implementation that’s built around a digital transceiver chip, an ATMEL mcu and a digital voice compression chip. Compared to most digital radio’s I’ve seen, this one is pretty simple. The really complex action lives in the main chips with a bunch of caps and resistors to support them. Watch out for Digikey’s pricing – it looks like a major gouge after looking at the tx/rx chips on Analog Device’s site. If you get them at a decent price, they could make great rf links for your projects. The link to the paper seems a bit broken, but here’s the correct one.