imac

23 Articles

Hackaday Links: November 15, 2015

November 15, 2015 by 13 Comments

There are a surprising number of Raspberry Pis being used in industrial equipment. This means the Arduino is left behind, but no longer. There’s your PLCs that use Arduinos.

A few weeks ago, Google introduced a machine intelligence and computer vision technique that made the world look psychedelic. Now, this library is available. On another note, head mounted displays exist, and a sufficiently creative person could mash these two things together into a very, very cool project.

Welcome to Kickstarter! Kickstarter is an uphill battle. People will doubt you because you don’t have a ‘target audience’ or ‘the rights to this franchise’ or ‘any talent whatsoever’, but that’s what crowdfunding is for!

Several years ago, Apple shipped a few million 17″ iMacs with defective displays. They’re still useful computers, though, especially if you can find a replacement LCD. Apple, in all its wisdom, used a weird connector for this LCD. Here’s the adapter board, and this adapter will allow displays running up to 1920×1200.

[Jan] has earned a reputation of building some very cool synths out of single ARM chips. His previous build was a Drumulator and now he’s shrinkified it. He’s put four drum sounds, pitch CV, and audio out on an 8-pin DIP ARM.

YouTube gives you cadmium! [AvE], recently got 100,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel. Apparently, YouTube sends you a terrible belt buckle when you manage to do that. At least he did it without playing video games and screaming.

Finding The Fix For A Dimmed 27″ IMac Screen

January 21, 2014 by 29 Comments

machack27

Like many with a 27″ iMac, [Gerry’s] been experiencing some screen brightness issues. According to him, Apple’s been largely ignoring the problem and the community’s outcry, which led to [Kaos2k] poking around inside to hack together a fix. It’s a solution clearly born from trial and error; [Kaos2k’s] initial post on the issue simply recommending “applying pressure” to the panel itself, which would sometimes cause the dim screen to spring back to life.

It turns out that heat (or stress, or something) from the screen causes the solder joints to weaken on the board where a 6-pin connector hooks up, dimming the screen to eye-strain levels. Some Mac users are suing over it, because the problem tends to show up just outside of the warranty window and affects a large number of people. [Kaos2k], however, provided the much needed solution for those looking to get the fix over with: just solder the cable directly to the board. Our tipster, [Gerry], has documented his experiences over at his blog, and was kind enough to make a step-by-step video of the repair, which you can see after the break.

Continue reading “Finding The Fix For A Dimmed 27″ IMac Screen” →

Hackaday Links: August 11, 2013

August 11, 2013 by 17 Comments

While we’re not much for fashion hacks, we’re reasonably impressed with [Karolina]’s faux Chanel bag made of chips. Apparently a grid of black squares is one of Chanel’s trademark looks, and a thousand or so QFP chips makes for a reasonable substitution.

News of the death of our retro edition has been greatly exaggerated. [Brandon] got an old Apple IIe up on the Internet and loaded up our retro edition, so we’re sort of obliged to mention him. He’s using a Super Serial Card connected to an OS X box running lynx. With getty running, he can shoot the output of lynx over to the Apple. Awesome.

Take an old Yamaha organ, convert the keyboard to MIDI, throw in a few Arduinos, thousands of LEDs, and a handful of bubble machines. What you end up with is the bubble organ, as seen at the Bass Coast Festival last weekend. If you want a hands on, you can also check it out at the Rifflandia festival in BC, Canada this September.

Some guy over on reddit created the smallest Arduino in the world. We’re looking at a rank amateur here, though. I’ve been working on this little guy for the last 18 months and have even created an open source cloud based github design for the production model. It’s less than half the size of a Digispark, and also Internet of Things 3D interactive education buzzword buzzword.

[Moogle] found an old Super 8 camera at an estate sale. No big deal right? Well, this one is clear, and it uses light-sensitive film. Your guess is as good as ours on this one, but if you know what’s up, drop a note in the comments.

One day [John] decided he would put a PC inside an old G3 iMac. After a year, it’s finally done. He took out the CRT and replaced it with a 15″ Dell monitor. The G3 was discarded for an AMD, and the internal speakers and slot-load CD drive still work. It’s a really, really cool piece of work.

Hacked Together Mac Isn’t A Hackintosh

April 16, 2013 by 59 Comments

hacked-together-macintosh

Check out this 20″ iMac. Notice anything peculiar? Look closely at the branding above the Apple logo. The only thing that tips you off that this iMac is a hacked together unit is that Acer logo on the replacement screen.

As we’ve so often been caught doing, [Flippy] was browsing eBay for deals. It’s a dangerous activity because you end up falling into purchases like an Aluminum iMac for $35. That led to the purchase of a very slim LED LCD monitor to use as the display. It fits perfectly behind the iMac’s glass bezel, which has a tiny chip in the upper right corner that doesn’t bother [Flippy]. It’s thin enough that this actually left room for him to add in the guts of a MacBook Pro which he had sitting in his unused parts pile. With all of the main components accounted for the rest is really just logistics like routing all of the cable connectors and adding openings for USB ports. What he ended up with is a high-end computer for a low-end price.

IMac Reborn With Present-day Parts

September 5, 2012 by 20 Comments

[Paul] spent his summer bringing an iMac G3 into this decade. There’s plenty of room to work with since he removed the CRT which originally occupied most of the computer’s space. The final project is much more powerful and since he preserved most of the metal mounting parts inside it remains quite strong.

He started by swapping flat screen monitors with his Grandma (who incidentally runs Linux… nice!). She had a 15″ model which would fit nicely in the case so he upgraded her to 17″ and took the old one. With bezel removed it fits perfectly where to old tube had been. Next comes the power supply. It’s mounted on the bracket which held the back of the tube, with a bit of metal removed to clear the air intake. To mount the motherboard he fabricated a bracket at one end where the iMac’s stage drops away. In retrospect he wishes he had rotated the board to make the I/O panel more accessible. The hard drive mounts on the original carriage, and he did some creative gluing to make his replacement DVD drive align with the original optical drive opening. The finished product looks great from the front and sides, with the cables running out the back as the only indication that it’s had some major work done on it.

SSD Upgrade For 24″ IMac

November 3, 2009 by 78 Comments

24-inch-imac-ssd-conversion

The hard drive in [Jason’s] 24″ iMac was on the blink. He decided that instead of just swapping out the bad drive for a traditional unit he would upgrade to a solid state drive. Tearing apart high-end hardware like this can be a bit nerve-racking but luckily the drive is mounted right behind the screen so he didn’t have to take everything apart.

The SSD he picked up was 2.5″ but the mounting hardware in the iMac is only setup for 3.5″ form factors. We would have used a bit of hackery to make it work but [Jason] went with an adapter kit. Uh-oh, once installed there was no problem with the mounting but the SATA cable didn’t reach far enough to plug it in. The cable snaked around under the motherboard and would have been a lot of work to swap for  a longer one. He ended up removing all of the mounting screws except for one coercing the drive close enough for the connection.

It worked for him and it can for you as well. If you do this make sure to devise your own mounting scheme so that you don’t hit the same snag.

[Photo: AppleInsider iMac teardown]

[via TUAW]

Tear Your IMac’s Insides Out

September 25, 2009 by 28 Comments

imac1_external_hdd_ mod

Saying that [Ian] had some overheating issues with his iMac G5 would be an understatement. After losing three hard drives due to heat he decided to do something about it. The first step was replacing the thermal paste with Arctic Silver. The solution for the hard drive was a little more unorthodox.

[Ian] picked up a 320GB Western Digital Caviar Blue drive because of its very low noise rating. He used rubber grommets to mount it outside the case and ran SATA data and power extension cables through a quarter inch hole to the motherboard. He mentioned to us that the cutout seen above the drive is from a previous mod.

This certainly will fix an overheating problem but it doesn’t do much for the sexy style we’re accustomed to with Apple hardware.