Misc Hacks

4182 Articles

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.

Ben Heck Interview Part 2

November 10, 2006 by 9 Comments

Here’s part 2 of my interview with Ben. (Or just grab it via the feed) We answer some more questions and go off on a few tangents about cnc machines, the PS3 and part sources. It cuts directly to the interview – I don’t want to wait 6 hours to record it. I should have a regular podcast up in the next day or two.

Five Dollar Eprom Programmer

November 8, 2006 by 23 Comments


A couple years ago I spent a good week wiring up a fairly complex EPROM programmer so I could burn a prom for my jeeps EFI system. Today I ran across this $5 version. build built by Jay Kominek He uses shift registers to handle the addressing and IO lines, all driven directly by the parallel port. There’s no way to escape the number of pins that have to be wired up, but the schematic itself is pretty simple.
[By the way, arcade supply shops are a great source for cheap UV erase EPROMS.]

[Update: I’d forgotten about the voltage change (3 vs 5 if I remember) needed to write UV EPROMS vs EEPROMS. With a little mod, you can certainly use this for EPROMS as well.]