Meet the DIY Dvorak keyboard. I’m feeling nostalgic this week, and I was surprised that we’ve never mentioned this simple, but useful hack. Heresy history lesson: the qwerty keyboard was created to slow down typing – because old typewriters jammed too easily. The Dvorak keyboard is more efficient because the letters that are most often used are positioned closer to the fingers natural position. [Anders] swapped the keys on his Swedish thinkpad, and even customized the map a bit further to his own taste.
Peripherals Hacks1573 Articles
Printer Networked Light Control
[Andy] sent in his ‘Network Something‘ hack. For his proof of concept, he used a parallel port printer network adapter to create a set of network controllable LEDs. The virtual printer was implemented with a set of shift registers and a set of nand gates. (and a power regulator). Old print servers can be had pretty cheap – my HP $8 on ebay. Definitely an interesting way to get inexpensive network control of your projects.
Note: We’ll be making some server changes today and tomorrow, so comments will be offline for a bit. They’ll be back.
Keybot – Serial Controllable Keyboard Interface
[john] sent in his uncles Keybot project. The device accepts input (a parallel port in this case) and generates standard keyboard output. It allows a computer to create its keyboard input for itself or another machine. Personally, I go for serial consoles, but it’s a good study of our old friend the keyboard. (If legos are more your thing, you could do something like this.)
USB CNC Controller
This one reminds me of a MAME arcade controller. This control panel is just the gravy on top of a very nice CNC conversion for a Sieg X2 mini mill. (Like mine.) [Hoss] used a Logitech attack 3 joystick and a philips PC game pad to provide the interface. Of course, the case was machined on the mill. The thread covering his conversion provides DXF diagrams of all the parts he used for his CNC conversion, as well as explanation diagrams. (If you need a decent DXF viewer/cad program, try Qcad in the ubuntu repositories.)
Optical Recognition LED Control
I probably shouldn’t find this as worthy as I do. It’s the optical recognition equivalent of wiring up a LED to a switch,, but it just appeals to me. [Ashish], one of our favorite optical recognition hackers of late, sent along this product of his boredom. If only he’d give us some source and a wiring diagram…
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Build Your Own ECG Heart Monitor
Our own Hack-A-Day emeritus took some time out from his showgirl pursuits to pass this along. The ECG was built to pad a resume, but it doesn’t make it less useful. Be warned, too much power could stop your heart. If you build one, triple check everything before wiring yourself up. Basically, an electrical differential is generated by the contraction of muscles in the heart. This slight signal is amplified by an op-amp and sampled with an A/D converter.
Watercooled LED Backlit LCD
[john] mentioned this on the LCD LED backlight post. Given the date on the posts, I was surprised that we haven’t seen it before. He replaced the CCFL lamp with 32 1 watt luxeon LEDs mounted on a custom copper water cooling block. The result is bright enough to be sunlight viewable in his car.
