Misc Hacks

4086 Articles

Thursday Mini-extra

October 26, 2006 by 11 Comments

[Russ] sent in his Great Pumpkin computer case mod. (Non-biodegradable)

[Nuke] sent in his $10 ipod dock. It makes me think of doom for some reason.

[phnx] sent in this amusing case mod.

These have been around, but they’re excellent, so deal. Evilmadscientist.com has a couple of great pumpkins.
Check out the Cylon Jackolantern and the R/C Dalek Pumpkin

[Daedalus] sent in this one – adsl via sound card. 96kbs. The sound card is interfaced
with an audio transformer to the line at each end.

And this one just came in from [Eric]. Make a magsafe connector for thinkpads! Awesome.

LED Sensor Solar Tracker

October 25, 2006 by 18 Comments


More of my EV kick coming through. A solar tracker is used rotate a solar panel to get optimum energy from the sun. This one uses LEDs as the light sensor and mosfets to drive the output to rotate on a single axis. He even reduced the duty cycle on the fets so no heatsink is needed. Mounting in a peanut butter jar keeps the circuit dry and allows the sun to shine through. (The designer sells these, but has circuits up on the site)

Sequential Battery Charging

October 15, 2006 by 18 Comments


I’m getting pretty interested in building an electric motorcycle, and I ran across this little hack to charge multiple batteries with one charger. It uses a 4020 counter that’s pulsed by my dear friend the 555 to activate a series of relay pairs to switch a single charger sequentially between battery cells. A more advanced version could use a microcontroller to monitor the state of each cell to ensure even charging. If you’re thinking of constructing an uber-ups, this could be useful.

Hack Day Winners

October 12, 2006 by 12 Comments


Yahoo recently held *Ahem* Hack Day developers conference/workshop. The winner’s pictured – a ‘blogging purse’. It looks like it just uploads images. The details are a bit on the weak side, but some of the stuff looks neat. The purse contains a camera, basic stamp, pedometer and Nokia phone.
The YBox is some sort of network to TV gateway (Microcontroller, Ethernet, IR reciever, RF out in an altoids tin). Looks like it pulls data from yahoo channels, but supposedly it’s configurable for custom data.

Speaking of contests, [David] pointed out this ARM design contest – entering will garner you a free dev kit.