[Ozan] sent in his first attempt at making his own heads up display. The optics are very simple in design, and he gutted a commercial heads up display (ICUITI) for the LCD panel and interface electronics. I haven’t played with many head mounted displays since the Nintendo virtual boy. I’m not up on my field of view calculations, so it’s difficult to equate this to a commercial headset.
Peripherals Hacks1540 Articles
Wii Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Sensor Bar
[duff] found this and sent it in. The video demonstrates that the Wii ‘sensor bar’ is just an array of IR leds. The actual sensor is in the remote control – which probably sends data to the Wii via RF. These guys faked the ir signal using a pair of standard remotes. This’ll probably open the door to some controller cheats as things progress. [Better than using a belt sander on a trackball.]
[Hey – If you want to get on the podcast, email some questions or comments as mp3s to podcast at hackaday.]
Screen Saver Power Switching
This is another power control hack along the lines of the serial controlled power outlet. Instead of only managing a printer, [Brent] uses the IO lines of the parallel port to drive some SSRs in order to turn off all of his peripheral devices – think lamps, speakers, scanners, etc. He posted the whole thing over on instructables.
[Want to show off your skills? Send us a tip with your latest – or enter the Hackaday design challenge. I should have some more prizes to announce later this week. I’m just waiting for them to arrive.]
Mp3 Flash Recovery
[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.]
DIY Wacom Cintiq
In case you haven’t caught it already, check out this DIY Wacom Cintiq – AKA Wacom pad LCD tablet. Drew Northcott built his own for a couple hundred in parts. It’s a cool hack – I figured I better put up an extra post before I my inbox gets filled with it. Thanks for the tips guys!
Serial Controlled Power Outlet
[Alan] sent me his simple rs-232 controlled power outlet. He built it to turn on his laser printer when a print job appeares in the queue. The relay is directly controlled by the DTR line on the serial port. Lots of espresso machine PID conversions use them to run boilers, so he could have avoided the extra mechanical relay. [I can’t pick on him too much, my old laserwriter is on all the time.]
He tied it together with some perl to turn on the printer and get the print job going once it’s had enough time to initialize.
Happy Halloween Extra
[Update: pumpkin carved by Team Hack-A-Day member mastershake916]
We’ve got plenty of tricks around here, and I’ve got a treat coming up – you’ll hear about it in the next podcast.
[Ronald Schaten] sent me his USB LED fader. ATMega, PWM lit LEDs, he uses it to indicate status on his pvr.
[computerguru365] sent in his cell phone car charger turned USB cable
[steve] sent in this over the top C64DTV mod.
[Everett] sent along his button activated PSP shoulder lighting.Nice tiny soldering work for that on.
[Jorge] sent in his friends latest junk art metal lathe. Not an easy thing to build – Nice!
[gijs] sent me this crazy bent Casio SK-1. We’ve had a few of these on Hackaday before.
[seniorcheez] sent in his iPod shuffle dock with integrated power and tunecast.
