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.
Misc Hacks4137 Articles
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.
Atari Punk Console
It seems Hack-A-Day’s resident snow bunny has run off to Utah and left me holding the proverbial bag. How could a heart broken hacker possibly console himself? How about the soothing sounds of the Atari Punk Console? Well… soothing is a subjective term, but the screaming, bleeping, fuzzy sound generated by this simple circuit is great. Since their first post on the Atari Punk Console circuit last fall, GetLoFi has collected many different examples of the circuit. It’s just a 556, a few caps, and pots so it lends itself easily to modification. The most recent post is built in an actual Atari mouse.
Going Snowboarding Extra
I’m heading west to do some snowboarding, so I thought I’d clean out the stuff I’ve been saving for you guys.
[Nagi Punyamurthula] sent his notes on making PCBs. It’s a nice introduction if you’re new to it.
[Monster] sent in his how to on making a solder mask
He suggests using mcmaster-carr p/n 9709K61 (4 mil) or 9709K55 (3 mil) copper sheet.
[monster] and [uchobby] sent in using a scanner to take measurements on a PCB
[MoneyOx] sent in a DIY Wii sensor bar
[Tom] sent in Water cooling via swimming pool. This made slashdot, but worth a look if you missed it.
Meta is another DIY segway, similar to [Trevor Blackwells]. (I’ve actually ridden that one) Thanks [Peter]
[Zack] sent along details on using a Nintendo DS for VoIP.
[Bruce] sent in his shuffle in a hockey helmet hack. I like the pseudo-dock he created for it.
This was on engadget a while back, but we’ve been getting lots of tips. Check out the iPod in a gameboy mod.
Finally, [everyone on the planet] sent in this Xbox 360 tilt controller hack.
Thanks to everyone for their tips!
WiiBot – Armed And Pointy
[Brian] sent in his Wiimote hacking project – he and his cohort used it to control an industrial sized robot arm. Then they armed it. Keep in mind that the sword is full size. [Aaron] ended up writing a basic pattern recognition program to get it to perform they way they wanted. Response time is a bit laggy, but not bad for a one-off project. I need my own industrial robot.
Wii Laptop How-To (Part 1)
Part one of Ben’s Wii Laptop How-To series is up. Ben spends it discussing gutting the Wii, starting up his CAD process for designing the enclosure and makes the thing even smaller than it was before. Because the Wii is so small to begin with, I think alot of people assumed that he just slapped it into a case and added the display.
Concrete Cast Speakers
[Markus] sent in his 5.1 concrete speaker project. Each speaker is cast from a single piece of concrete. The inner cavity is created using the dear old lost-wax technique. The writeup is in german, but the process is pretty clear.
