Misc Hacks

4137 Articles

Tuesday Mini-extra

November 21, 2006 by 10 Comments

[Jon] noted that this guy is using his Prius as backup UPS for his house. [It’s been around, but’s it’s worthy.]

If you’re having issues with Eagle for the contest, [weirdguy] suggests this tutorial.

[Lain Sharp] sent in his three blind mice project. This is his version of the 3D mouse. with an AVR to send the data to windows via serial port.

[Michael] added an aux ‘input’ to his car stereo in a unique fashion – he wired it directly to the car speakers and drives them from his iPod. [I’m not recommending this, but it’s certainly a different approach.]

Finally, [oliverjenks] sent in this table saw finger jig hack – using some random power transistors, light bulbs and a laptop to drive a stepper motor.

If you haven’t already, check out our Design Challenge contest. I finally got some fedex shipping notifications today, so I should be able to officially announce more prizes very soon.

Homemade Cathode Ray Tubes

November 20, 2006 by 5 Comments


[dylan] tipped us to [Nyle Steiner] who’s been making his own cathode ray tubes Not satisified with that, he made an even smaller one[youtube] and he built an oscilloscope[youtube].

Once I noticed that he’s an amateur radio operator, I started digging around his site. His propane lawnmower is a great idea, his diy photocell makes me think of mr. wizard. If you dig tube amps, you’ll definitely be interested in his vaccum tube building experiments.

[Got a cool circuit? Lay it out on a PCB and enter the Design Challenge.]

Paintball Minigun

November 17, 2006 by 25 Comments


Every so I often I Google “paintball minigun“. This time it actually turned up something good. Special effects builder Rick Galinson has been working on a… wait for it… paintball minigun (cache). There is a video of a dry fire run on his site. He’s apparently having trouble with the triggers; I just want to know how he plans on loading it.

Rick has a lot of other cool projects. He’s got a cool two arm minigun prop (cache) (looks like Monev the Gale), A remote controlled submarine (cache), and a really cool telemetry suit (cache) for collecting upper body movement data.

For completeness’ sake you can check out Monty’s Miniguns for information on other paintball miniguns and miniguns in general.

Mp3 Flash Recovery

November 16, 2006 by 10 Comments


[Bart] sent in his efforts to recover the flash data on a mysterious mp3 player he found laying about. He successfully built an interface using a AVR/ATmega setup to get access to the data. This could be a viable way to recover data from broken thumbdrives – but it’s probably easier to swap the flash chip onto another drive. The Chipquik stuff sounds interesting – cold SMD chip desoldering. Given the cost, I’m not sure just how cost effective it is compared to buying a rework station.

[If you haven’t already, check out the Hackaday Design Challenge Fabienne’s nano is one prize and I’ll be announcing more prizes as soon as I’ve got them in hand.]

Design Challenge Mini-extra

November 15, 2006 by 14 Comments

Check out our new contest – design a business card PC board.

[Windell] sent in his tv-b-gone retro mod. [I want one that changes all the TVs to the SciFi channel.] He points out the ultra tv-b-gone as well.

[pillowcase] sent in his iTunes shower button – skip songs mid shampoo.

We heard about making a portable high power laser from a DVD burner laser yesterday, but the bandwidth was exceeded before we got there. It’s back up, for now.

[Mitch] let us know that a few days ago+ we appeared on TV in a lock bumping ad on Channel 6 WOWT News in Nebraska. Anyone else seen this?

Don’t forget that this site is driven by tips, so keep us in mind when you whip out the soldering iron.

Make A Badass CNC Mill

November 12, 2006 by 13 Comments


Ben Heck and I got into converting a mill to be a CNC machine during our podcast interview. Today I found a pair of great write ups at balbots on modding the Harbor Freight mini mill that I mentioned. Part 1 get into all the details of converting the mill to use stepper motors, and adding a cooling system. Part 2 covers upgrading to DC servo motors and replacing the gears with a belt drive system.

Bad Boy Charger

November 11, 2006 by 21 Comments


This is one of those hacks that scares me a little bit. The ‘Bad Boy’ charger was created by Tom Martin to charge EV battery packs. [Pictured is one built by Mike Chancy] You can find the schematic under austinev’s tech files. This thing is a bare minimum power supply – it’ll deliver loads of essentially unregulated power into a set of batteries. If you check out the circuit, you’ll see just how scary this thing really is, but according to its users, it works.