The Cisco Unified IP Phone 7960G is becoming fairly common in corporate environments. The phone has a built in XML browser for navigating menus. [Nick] decided to hack together a PHP application that will let the phone display email messages in a POP3 account. In its current form it works with most text-only messages, but limited filtering means it could fail on some.
Humans exhale a lot of oxygen along with their waste carbon dioxide. Instead of throwing out this oxygen, a rebreather uses a scrubber to remove the CO2 and replace it with pure oxygen from a bottle. Tom Rose built this rebreather for $100. When you exhale air passes through the scrubbing material and is stored in hot water bottle counterlung until you inhale. The system is only 15 pounds; a great savings compared to most dive equipment. You are definitely putting your life in your own hands so this should not be used without plenty of “couch-diving” tests. Tom has a ton of other diving related projects on his site.
[via Divester]
Continue reading “$100 Hot Water Bottle Pendulum Rebreather”
Hack-A-Day reader [Mindaugasu] built this box for exposing copper boards to ultraviolet light before etching them. It has two banks of four 20W UV lamps. The box is lined with reflective foil. The banks can be controlled separately and the exposure time is set by an Atmel AT90. You can change the time using button panel and LCD. He’s got some example boards in his ARM development section.
I use the qualifier “commercial-grade” here because this TIG welder project goes far beyond our junkyard TIG welder. The welder has a 180 amp capacity and has most (if not all) of the features of a modern welder. Instead of using a microprocessor, Dave Barrett decided to use discrete TTL and CMOS logic. That decision should make the design a lot easier to troubleshoot. Schematics and board layouts are on his site.
[UPDATE: I forgot to thank demmion for the tip]
Laser based listening devices work by bouncing the beam off of a window. Sounds in the room cause minute vibrations in the window. These vibrations modulate the laser beam. The laser beam is then converted back into sound at the receiver. Hack-A-Day reader [Aaron v] decided to build one of these devices. It worked, but needs some improvement. He followed plans found here (Coral CDN cache). I’ve also got a local copy of the receiver schematic since there doesn’t seem to be too many of these projects with decent hosting. Williamson Labs has a good discussion of the problems these systems can run into and more advanced setups like interferometry.
MP3elf is a network attached MP3 player. It can stream MP3s from your hard drive or connect to internet radio stations. The design is BSD licenced so you can download all of the plans and build it yourself if you want. They’ve got kits available as well. The server portion is written in Java so it should run on your operating system of choice.
[thanks Default]
Super Soda! has been posting a lot of projects, but this is one of my favorites. We covered otherpower’s wind turbine a while ago, but Damon Vander Lind’s turbine features hand-laid fiberglass blades. The core of each blade is hot wire cut out of pink foam by following a wooden airfoil pattern. The fiberglass is laid all at once with five layers at the base and two at the tip. Each layer is slightly offset to handle torque. The entire assembly is mounted to a permanent magnet generator contained inside an alternator case.
[thanks Ryan Bavetta]
