This project consists of retrofitting a vacuum cleaner to fire a projectile through the usage of air pressure (or lack thereof). The parts: Vacuum cleaner, obtained from a garage sale, 12″ wooden dowel, 10 feet PVC pipe, and Tee fitting for the pipe. I’ve seen bigger versions of these do some amazing things like send a ping pong ball through metal cans. Link.
Great use for that old drive! MuCoP allows you to play your favourite music CDs on an “old” PC CDROM drive, instead of throwing it away. It consists of the bare essentials: a PIC microcontroller (16F877), 6 push-buttons, stereo audio amplifier (TDA2822M) and a few discrete components, not forgetting the IDE CDROM drive. Link.
The LED bed uses Red, Green, and Blue LEDs, it works the same way asr TV or computer monitor works, Red+Green=Yellow, Red+Blue=Purple. The Maker has a how-to, photos and a kit if you don’t care to build your own. Link.
Add a NES emulator to the growing list of hardware you can emulate on a PSP. But this is for the 1.0 version of the PSP which was on the early units in Japan and now Ebay. So for now, there’s only a handful of folks that can run these emulators and homebrew games, but there’s a lot of effort being put in to this and soon we’ll see emulator and other apps for our 1.5 PSP units. Via Waxy. Link.
The Gumball 3000 is a somewhat underground race London to Monaco through Hungary. Jalopnik has a round up of the coverage. Lots of live pictures, blogs and more. Last year my pal Alex Roy won one of the categories with his DIY police car- You can see the transformation and more about Gumball 144’s “Polizei” entry here.
These fellows made their own high-altitude balloons to take photos using a Dakota Digital camera, a Hi-Value Radio PocketTracker, two latex balloons from Kaymont and a parachute from Public Missiles. They also found a closeout on DigiTraveler GPSes from RadioShack. The balloon made it up to 52,000 feet, the pictures are really neat. Link. Via /.
Over on BoingBoing there’s a post about the new Dave Mattews CD that tries to install weird stuff when inserted, crashes and all sorts of things when used on a Windows based PC. I don’t have the CD but it sounds like MediaMax from SunnComm (SunnComm tried to sue a student awhile back). The simple solution is to hold the Shift key when you pop the CD in or disable Autorun (a good idea in general) here’s how.
