Posted Jul 5th 2008 7:48AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: pcs hacks, daily
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.
Posted Jul 4th 2008 7:50AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: transportation hacks, daily
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.
Posted Jul 3rd 2008 7:52AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: gps hacks, misc hacks, daily
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.
Posted Jul 1st 2008 7:43AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: home entertainment hacks, daily
[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.
Posted Jun 30th 2008 7:47AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: digital cameras hacks, daily
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.
Posted Jun 29th 2008 7:11AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: digital cameras hacks, daily
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.
Posted Jun 28th 2008 8:11AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: cellphones hacks, daily
[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.
Posted Jun 27th 2008 7:42AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: digital cameras hacks, daily
This fantastically huge housing was put together by [Ed Sauer]. He put it together using TIG welded 6061 aluminum for the body and machined the port mount out of 7075 aluminum. The lens port is a commercial unit from a housing manufacturer along with a few manual controls. He wrote up the build in
this pdf.
Posted Jun 26th 2008 7:51AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: misc hacks, daily
If you've ever tried ironing laser printed paper to transfer the toner, you know that it can be slightly frustrating. [Dave] sent in an
interesting twist on this method. The laser printer is used to print onto paper from a magazine and then the board and paper are both run through a laminating machine six or seven times. From the
writeup, it looks like this technique works great. (You'll probably need a printer with a manual feed tray to get it to print on the magazine paper)
Posted Jun 25th 2008 7:55AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: gps hacks, daily
This is a nice, compact gps logger that's built around a PIC16F872 and some eeprom chips. It was designed for a particular GPS receiver, but should be easily adaptable to others since the unit ouputs standard sentences at 4800 baud. Full schematics and board layout are available on the
project page.
Posted Jun 24th 2008 9:40AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: misc hacks, daily
Here's one more use for the insanely handy LM555 chips. [Terry] put together a
Tesla coil tuner around one. The 555 is used to generate a range of frequencies while a simple double LED arrangement indicates the presence of an output spike from a coil due to the resonance.
Posted Jun 23rd 2008 8:45AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: misc hacks, daily
This applies more to older vacuum technology than your average solid state hardware, but [Richard] put together an interesting project. It's designed to test a component for
its breakdown voltage without destroying it. The general idea of the 'BVT' is to increase the voltage applied to a device until some current leakage is detected. Of course, any device that includes notes on probable arc length in relation to kilovolts is awesome by definition.
Posted Jun 22nd 2008 7:28AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: transportation hacks, daily
[Dem_z] modded his Honda VTEC engine to use a set of
individual throttle bodies from a 2001 Suzuki GSX-R motorcycle. The fuel injection bungs on the throttle bodies were epoxied shut and the bodies were only used to provide individual butterflies for each cylinder. This one doesn't quite make our to do list, but it's definitely a hack.
[bender386] caught
my blunder first, so I'll be sending him a bit of Hack-A-Day swag. In the meantime, here's a little bonus: Check out this home built
anamorphic lens. Native 2.35:1 projectors have started showing up, but they're insanely expensive. By adding some image processing and a lens to stretch the projected image, you can get full width projection and use all the pixels on the projector.
Posted Jun 21st 2008 7:38AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: home entertainment hacks, daily
Here's a classic project for the weekend. This KT88 based
tube amplifier is surprisingly simple. The parts count is low, but the sound produced by the amplifier is considered quite pleasing. For the budget conscious, there are several optional tubes that can be used in place of the primary KT88.
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