Boston LED Sweatshirt Arrestee Interviewed

September 19, 2008 by Eliot 43 Comments

In today’s episode of Boing Boing tv, [Xeni] interviews [Star Simpson]. She was arrested a year ago at Boston’s Logan airport for wearing a sweatshirt with a breadboard and some LEDs attached. With a collective groan, we watched this event unfold just months after Boston was held captive by Mooninites. After many court dates, [Star] is being forced to apologize and perform community service. She has since left MIT, disappointed with their nonexistent support, and left Boston entirely. Watch the interview for her side of the story. She’s posted how to recreate the sweatshirt.

Cigarette Tin Amp

June 30, 2008 by Juan Aguilar 7 Comments

We’re a little confused: [xXxMrCarlosxXx] built an amp out of a cigarette tin and calls it a Mobile Oppression Unit, but we thought all mobile oppression came in the form of giant, invincible crab-shaped palaces. In any case, or more specifically, in a repurposed Lucky Strikes case, he used an mp3 player, some speakers from a garage sale, and a bread board packing an LM1877N-9 chip “optimized for loudness” to construct a great-looking, compact boom box. Check out his Flickr stream at the read link and begin oppressing your neighbors with sheer volume today.

Make Your Own Guitar Pedal With Beavis Board

June 18, 2008 by Juan Aguilar 12 Comments

Beavis Audio has recently released the Beavis Board, a kit to help fledgling guitar pedal builders. The kit addresses four typical problems in this endeavor: learning to solder, dealing with breadboards, sourcing parts, and making sense of schematics. By including a breadboard/psu/switch combo and tons of other parts as well as informative and easy to read schematics, all of these problems are alleviated, allowing eager builders to get to work right out of the box.

The kit costs $249 and we’re guessing it’s a little too “entry level” for most of you. It has a highly informative manual in PDF format. You could use that to get ideas and then source your own parts. Have any of you built a guitar pedal specifically for prototyping?

[via Music Thing]

How-To: Introduction To Soldering

October 26, 2007 by Will O'Brien 54 Comments

It’s been a while since we’ve had a fresh How-To on the Hack-A-Day, and frankly we’ve missed them. To get things rolling, [Eliot] and I wanted to build a good knowledge base to help you hack your own stuff. I know that soldering won’t be new to many of our readers, but everyone has to start sometime. Our hope is simple: that this new series of How-To’s will help inspire new and experienced hackers alike.

Continue reading “How-To: Introduction To Soldering” →