Misc Hacks

4181 Articles

Cheap Balancing Skateboard

March 10, 2007 by 11 Comments


[Tony] submitted his site showing his recent projects. Besides his balancing scooter, and light creations, I thought his take on the balancing skateboard was interesting. The drive components came from a pair of $10 cordless drills, and the motor controller consists of a pair of relays and mosfets.(There’s a pic controller, gyro and accelerometer behind them) It’s not elegant, but these sorts of hacks are great for inspiring those on a budget.

Don’t forget, the new revised US daylight savings time is coming.

Friday Night Extra

March 9, 2007 by 9 Comments


I’ll be busy with my soldering iron tonight, but I thought it was time for an extra.

[Joe] notes that if you’d like to put up some graffiti you probably won’t get arrested for, you might light projection bombing.

[Emil] noted that [mark] successfully upgraded his ipod mini to run an eight GB CF card. (He’d previously put a 4GB flash card in.

[XanTium] notes that several patches have been released for the Linux 2.6.20 kernel specifically to support XBox 360 hardware. A Linux loader is soon expected to be released to exploit the Hypervisor vulnerability.

[CtrlAltDefeat] pointed out an interesting DIY camera card to hard drive memory dump device.

[Bobby] sent in a teaser of his DIY bluetooth Sony MDR 300 headphones.

World Weather Umbrella

March 9, 2007 by 3 Comments


[Peter] brings us the oddest hack of the week. It’s a little esoteric, but interesting. This modified umbrella is used in conjunction with a giant world map outline. A camera takes note of the umbrella position and correlates the location. The user walks around and ‘experiences’ the weather in that location of the world. If you’d prefer to have everyone think you’re nuts, you could just interface it with your ipod.

Printer Networked Light Control

February 21, 2007 by 9 Comments


[Andy] sent in his ‘Network Something‘ hack. For his proof of concept, he used a parallel port printer network adapter to create a set of network controllable LEDs. The virtual printer was implemented with a set of shift registers and a set of nand gates. (and a power regulator). Old print servers can be had pretty cheap – my HP $8 on ebay. Definitely an interesting way to get inexpensive network control of your projects.

Note: We’ll be making some server changes today and tomorrow, so comments will be offline for a bit. They’ll be back.