I’ve been pulling some long days between driving everyone around in the snow and winding up the HD projector How-To. I’ve received a few more entries to the Design Challenge. You’ve got ’til Christmas!
[bruce land] pointed us to Cornel’s ECE576 final projects. The results using FPGAs are pretty impressive.

[jbauer] noted this site on hacking Insteon power controls sans the $200 SDK.

[dayne] sent along his USB xmas lights how-to. Pretty simple, but useful for cube decorating.

[pillowcase] tuned another innocent bluetooth headset into a bluetooth sound interface. (Goodwill gets these things now?)

Oh, and if you want ethernet for your xmas tree/candelabra/etc, these guys show you how.

I was pondering building a new karkomp, and was happy to find that there’s actually an open source nav program.

Part 6 of my DIY HD Projector How-To is up on Engadget. It wraps up the series (sans final review, which willl be up later this week.) I think I managed to come up with a few new twists on the design. (Yes, the Hack will be up later. Sheesh.) I’m pretty happy with how it came out, even if it does appear to be larger than my old CRT projector.

[Walter] sent in his version of a PIC binary clock. It’s a nice alternative If you don’t want one that runs off TTL logic, This one runs on a PIC 16F628 (Microchip is great for samples) and displays hours in 5 bits and minutes in 6. His blog also features a decent looking programmer, and he shows off his version of the Suunto dive computer interface that’s been around for quite a while.

The DefconBots rules have been announced for Defcon 15. The reference design is actually pretty good on it’s own – I’m curious to see what sort of improvements the teams will come up with. The RD includes a full tutorial, so teams will definitely have a fighting chance. [via Midnight Research Labs]

The only rule is speed, so I wonder how many guns will feature multiple barrels. It seems that they don’t care how much ammuntion is used. (It does say no shotguns) Hrm, maybe a mini-gun that covers the 5×5 area with fine enough resolution to hit everything? Sure it lacks finesse, but firepower-a-plenty!

Now I can’t find his page but one of the Danger founders had built something similar using a Mac as the controller and a paintball gun. Of course, we’ve seen similar guns before.

[mo] sent me this video showing the latest on hacking the wiimote via bluetooth . They haven’t figured out all the values yet, but this is only the beginning. How long until we see some mac/pc games that can use the Wiimote?