You might remember [Janne]'s IKEA cluster. Now he's got a couple of dream rigs in mind, so he started doing 3D renderings of them. Helmer 2 is designed to contain 24 video cards attached to six motherboards with quad core CPUs. (AMD has even taken enough interest to send him some cpus to get started) The rendering really comes in handy for designing the custom copper heat pipes and the aluminum cooling fin enclosure. Still bored, he put together a rendering of a 4 PetaFLOP machine using 2160 video cards.
With fuel prices rising, EVs are becoming more an more stylish. This bit of floor tile wrapped hardware is actually a 12 channel battery management system designed to handle Lithium Iron battery packs. It's designed to take power from a standard lead acid charger and supply the batteries with their maximum charge current. The cost and complexity of the BMS has been a major stumbling block in the past, so it's interesting to see these come around. If you need more than 12 cells, multiple boards can be used.
Fresh off the tips line, [Jake] sent in his portable NES project. We've seen quite a few portables, but we love that the entire thing is built into an old NES cartridge. It's got 99 games and some clever control placement. Three N cells nestled in the former connector slot power the system. You can see more pic over at [Ben Heck]'s forum.
A short while back, [Chris Anderson] released an Arduino based autopilot. It rings in fairly cheap and being open source, you can tweak away. To add more functionality, he's releasing a dual core version. Thanks to the second processor, it no longer requires an external hardware co-pilot. It uses an on-board GPS and features an ATtiny based fail safe. It's still under development, but he's made the design files available.
We like clever work bench accessories; especially the kind that make our projects that much easier. [rstraugh] put up his version of the ubiquitous helping hands: thirdhand++. The arms are made from modular coolant tubing that's made for machine tools. With the basic arms in place, he created several attachments - like this PCB holder, a LCD holder, the usual alligator clips and even an oscilloscope probe holder.
The guys (and gals) over at the NYCResistor definitely know how to have a good time. They decided to roast some marshmallows with a Jacobs Ladder. Mmmm. There's nothing like fresh 15,000 volt roasted.
[muts] went through some trials, but managed to get metasploit running on his iPhone. Later he found out that it comes with the Cyida installer that he used on his journal to manually install it. Still, it's interesting to see these tools showing up on the platform.
[Gio] sent in this slick Class A headphone amp. An old CD-ROM case was gutted to hold the goods. The design is fairly simple. Cost can be kept fairly low although the capacitors can add up if you're a fanatic about quality. If you've ever lost any of your headphone gear to sticky fingers, you know that having it blending in to the background can be a great feature.
Hack-A-Day friend [Nathan] showed us some of his results creating his own High Dynamic Range images. Three normal Low Dynamic Range photos. One is under exposed, one is normal and the third is over exposed to capture the information needed. Then all three are used to create a single HDR image. Technically, the HDR image contains too much information to properly display, but even this limited version looks damn impressive.
You'll need a tripod, a camera that allows you to adjust your exposure value and a decent CPU to do the processing. (This pic took a couple of minutes to render on a quad core cpu) You can check out the full HDR photo here and one of the original frames here. For the software side, you can use pfstools on the command line or QtpfsGUI for the graphics side - both are free and open source. [Nathan] suggests a camera with bracket mode and a remote shutter release for best results. If you're all about theory, you can grab a white paper on the process here.
We just ordered up a new ATC3K video camera from Oregon Scientific for some, uh projects. (No, not our new porn site.) If you've got one of the older ATC2K cams, you can mod it a bit to avoid dropping another C-note on the new model. [Carlos] wrote up his mod to remove and replace the original narrow lens with a wide angle fisheye lens. The install requires some significant effort and some case modding - probably not a good idea if the waterproof feature is dear to you.
This particular unit has been de-commissioned since 2005, but it's still interesting. JACARA set up a webcam on Antarctica. They used an off the shelf Axis NetEye200 camera, mounted it inside a pair of hemispherical plastic domes along with a small electric heater and thermostat to keep the device from freezing.
[Wallace] sent in this awesome project built by [Julius Von Bismarck]. The "Image Fulgurator" is the result of mating an optical slave flash with a camera body turned projector. The result is the ability to project ghost images onto a picture being taken by anyone using a camera with their flash. Check out the demo video after the break or hit the project site for more.
We've seen plenty of lens hacks, but [Koray] took things in a new direction. Rather than buy lens chips for modding all of his manual lenses, he added a lens chip inside his Digital Rebel 300D (aka XT). Most of us might cringe at gutting their Rebel, but he performed this bit of soldering surgery on a unit he picked up for £40 and repaired. Excellent work!
Update: yeah yeah, the 300D is the original Digital Rebel.
[Barry] needed some way to get serial output to help debug his efforts to port Linux to the HTC TytnII (Windows mobile Pocket PC phone). He wrote some code to send serial output via one of the LEDs on the phone and rigged up an AVR to pic up the output and provide a USB interface to the computer. It runs at about 200bps - perfect for the quick debug session.
[Jipa] over at MetkuMods put up an original re-use for old hard drives: make em into power tools. The tiny servo motor that drives the spindle doesn't generate much torque, but once the drive is spinning fast enough, the inertial force of the platter is enough to make it usable for small grinding/sanding projects. The platters are re-stacked directly on top of each other to increase strength - we'd suggest a few dabs of epoxy to make em even stronger. Once stacked, a piece of sand paper is cut to size and held on by the center platter washer. [Via hacknmod]
