, probably our youngest contributor, has submitted another hack. This one is not that complicated, but fairly practical. He has an iPod shuffle, wants to play music through his stereo with it, but found there were no docks available. With iPod accessories being as prevelant as they are, we’re surprised to hear that. He took
Some grad students at Duke University have been working on a new tool for cell phones equipped with accellerometers. The software called Phonepoint Pen, allows you to write with your phone in the air. Though we don’t find the applications they mention very practical, we could see this being very nice for application navigation. If
is designing this open source POV system for bikes. With the recent release of Monkey Electric’s m464q, was inspired. He found the price tag of roughly $2,000 to be way too much though. He is designing his own and taking us along for the trip. He hasn’t quite reached the Monkey Electric level
isn’t very good at guitar. He says so himself. He’s not that great at guitar hero either. Was that medium difficulty? Let’s put aside his skill to talk about his controller. He has fused the guitar hero controller with a real guitar. The original guitar has retained its functionality, though the controller bits may
Is this the beginning of a new trend? We’ve seen case modding in computers for a while now, but are we going to start seeing extreme case modding for our CNC machines? This is Kali. Kali eats plastic and pukes parts. Nice.
Those of you who have played with a Pleo know exactly where this is going. The Pleo averages about 30 minues per 2-3 hour charge. Just swap batteries you say? Nope, the battery packs aren’t available. Fortunately, you can make your own pretty easily. The basic frame is a standard battery pack for 6 AA’s.
Made from a 1200 dpi epson scanner and a manual focus canon lens, this camera captures 130 Megapixel images. With a resolution of 13,068 x 10,173, these pictures are very detialed. You can see some examples in his flickr set. It doesn’t look like they’re the full size originals though. If you want to build
was going to be biking across Canada. He really wanted to document the trip, so he began planning ways to get still images taken at intervals along the way. After a bit of brainstorming, he ended up setting his goals a bit higher. He was going to film the entire trip. He really didn’t
sent us some news on Pleo’s future. Apparently a company called Jetta has bought the rights to Pleo during the bankruptcy sale. They intend on re releasing the cute little robot. They mention that they have built parts for the iRobot line. We wonder what they’ll do, if anything, to make it more appealing.
As many of you have mentioned, there are a lot of projects that are built with their own microprocessors, and are simply overkill. Here’s a reminder that we can do some pretty fun stuff light synchronized light shows without going overboard. This light show is controlled directly via the printer port on a computer. Sure
pointed us to this video of his PC-PIC II acting as a peripheral to his EEepc. You can see him playing pong, using it as a musical input, and even a video game controller. This project seems pretty nice, though we would like some more information. We tried digging around in the “projects” area
has found that he can build a pretty nice 2 axis joystick out of some VCR parts. Specifically, he’s using the idler wheel. When you disassemble the idler wheel, you’ll find that it has a bevelled washer in the perfect location to help with smooth joystick operation. Add a spring and a hole in
wrote us to show off his latest project. He built his multitouch interface out of an LCD monitor. We’ve seen plenty of multitouch projects here, but usually they are projection style. This project uses the panel out of an LCD, with the diffusers and backlighting removed. The panel itself is fairly transparent, so a
The newly released Palm Pre has been torn down by both Rapid Repair and iFixit. They note the easy to use interface, but the slide out keyboard makes for weird transitions. There’s nothing surprising on the hardware side except capacitive screen and LCD come as a single unit and would have to be replaced together
recently graduated from UC Berkely. For his graduation ceremony, he wanted to do something unique. He built a diorama on his graduation cap depicting a house driven from alternative energy. The whole thing is solar powered. The wind turbine is actually powered from the solar panel, and with a remote control, he can make
shows us in this video how he’s using an optical mouse as a low quality camera for his DS. This seems like a pretty cool hack, but we’re at a loss to think of a good use for it. As he gets to the end of the video, he seems to also have trouble
on the Acidmods.com forums has been working on a PSP laptop that we think gives the PSP GO a run for it’s money. Sure it may be a bit bulkier but it has a full keyboard, thanks to an Xbox chat pad. The original psp is on the bottom. The screen and speakers have
The new Palm Pre cellphone has a “media sync” feature which lets the device sync with iTunes in a fashion identical to an iPod. Last week speculated that this was not done in cooperation with Apple and that Palm was spoofing the iPod’s USB controller. This was confirmed today when a tipster
sent us this project he’s working on where he’s building a phototransistor based multitouch input system. Though many people have built systems with phototransistors, most of them are quite large and very sensitive light and dark variances. has done some fancy background subtraction through software. He believes his is the first to do
Remote-Exploit.org is releasing Keykeriki, a wireless keyboard sniffer. The project is both open source hardware and software. you can download the files on their site. Right now you can’t get a pre made board, but they plan on releasing one soon. The system can be upgraded with “backpacks” or add on modules. One of these
An industry first?
Look at this awesome glove. This awesome glove is used to control tetris. Yes, you read that right, it controls tetris. This was a final project at Cornell in the summer of 2008. They built this glove to do gesture controlled tetris. With all the announcements of the PS3 motion device and Microsoft’s project Natal,
Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has released the 2313 target board. A business card sized development board for working with ATTiny 2313 microprocessors. We saw them at the Maker Faire, and thought they looked familiar. You may recognize them due to their similarity to the Atmegaxx8 family board. As usual, this is released as creative commons
sent in this simple little project. He purchased a $3 spy ear, a simple 3 transistor amplifier, and attached a stethoscope end. Little modification was necessary, mainly just scraping a bit more space in the microphone tube. The end result is a super cheap electronic stethascope that can be hooked to a computer or
These nifty looking goggles are actually an instrument. The guts of a pikachu doll have been splayed and mounted to the goggles. The controller is an external box that allows you to make all kinds of changes to the pitch and sample section. You can see a video of it after the break. We don’t
