laptop

161 Articles

Simple Laptop Conversion

January 22, 2010 by 16 Comments

[Jakob] sent in his method of dealing with broken laptop hinges. Broken hinges are a plague. We have no less than 4 laptops lying around that are beyond repair with broken hinges. Some are just propped up against things, some have had box hinges glued to them and some are just waiting to die slowly from non use. [Jakob] has a nice neat conversion where he basically made a tablet. We’ve seen that before as well as picture frames. His version, while being quite possibly easier than most of the others, has a neat design aspect. An extended lip at the bottom fits in a groove in a plastic slab. All in one PC becomes a tablet in an instant. Not too shabby for a broken laptop. It looks like he needs to pop a touch screen kit on it though.

Ps3 Laptop Courtesy Of Ben Heck

October 21, 2009 by 16 Comments

ps3s_hero1

[Ben Heck] may be the coolest person ever (take that [Adam Savage]). You would think that after producing so many laptop versions of gaming consoles he would grow tired or we would be bored of them. But no! We love each and every new production – including his latest laptop-ified Ps3. Not too much in the terms of ‘new’ comes from his latest article, but it does reaffirm some things including: why make what you can buy, cheap foam sheet should be purchased by the ton, and use the screws from an overheated Xbox 360 when you lose the Ps3 originals. Oh, and [Adam] we were just kidding, you know we will always love you. Check out a video after the break.

[Via Ps3Mods]

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Laptop Running On A Sealed Lead Acid Battery

September 20, 2009 by 24 Comments

steupup_box

[Viktor’s] laptop needed a new battery; he had the trade off between carrying around a cheap but heavy sealed lead acid (SLA) battery, or buying an expensive but light Li-Ion battery. Figuring his old laptop was pretty heavy already, and having an unused SLA available, re-purposing it for his laptop wouldn’t be too much of a hassle. Using a boost converter he built out of a custom dip MAX668, he is able to output the necessary 5 amps required. An MC 34161 voltage monitor chip is planned for future revisions, but he’s currently running it just fine. Check out some of his other cool hacks on Karosium.

Related: MSI Wind extended battery

Ruggedize Your Not-so-rugged Portables

August 25, 2009 by 13 Comments

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Popular Mechanics has a detailed how-to on diy ruggedization of common portable electronics such as laptops, cameras, and cellphones. There is video of a laptop surviving an eight foot fall due to the tennis balls, pipe insulation, and weather stripping they’ve added. Its not just shock resistant, they’ve used a two-part compound marketed for making custom molded earplugs to make the laptop water resistant.

Second Hard Drive In A Macbook Pro

August 23, 2009 by 23 Comments

Picture 4 (Custom)

[Reid] wrote in to show us how to add a second hard drive to his Macbook Pro. He found that he hardly ever used his DVD drive, so sacrificed it in favor of added storage. What he found was that it had a proprietary adapter that he was unable to find for sale anywhere. Making an adapter may seem like a pretty simple hack, but this could save some people considerable time. Its also worth noting that upgrading the firmware got him an 18% speed increase, so don’t ignore those updates. We don’t see too many mac hacks around here, you may recall the mac tablet hacks and the logo monitor.

Touchpad + Arduino

July 23, 2009 by 12 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qt_VmJljmKU]

[Jani] directed us to his tutorial on making a laptop touchpad work with an Arduino. After seeing the recent post on touch pad and VFD hacking, he couldn’t resist finding one of these to play with. He shows us how to connect it all up and offers two methods of using the data from it. The first method is to determine the direction of finger travel and the second, shown above, is to use it more like the volume control on an iPod. Source code for both is available on his site.

Touchpad And VFD Hacking

July 20, 2009 by 17 Comments

p2 (Custom)

[Agent420] brought up this touchpad and VFD hack in the comments on our capicitive sensor guide post. He had broken dell laptop from which he harvested the touchpad and an HP laserjet that contributed the VFD. Though the touchpad communicates using standard PS2 protocol, he wanted to use it with his Atmel 8535 AVR which required him to write some custom code. In the picture above, you can see the VFD displaying the coordinates of his finger. You can download his code as well as the spec sheets for the different pieces on the project thread.