Technology
This little robot car from Nakamura-san at Himeji Soft Works in Japan drives around then it transforms into a real robot and walks around. I want to build one of these or buy one immediately. [
Tesla Coil made from trash…
Devin writes “These pages are a nice guide to making high voltage items (toys?) out of trash! These two pages show how to make a Tesla Coil out of trash, and how to hook up TV flyback ransformers for all sorts of fun HV stuff (arcs, jacob’s ladders, capacitor-bank charging, coin-shrinking, etc.)” Link & Link.
The Mouse Glove
Greg writes “These guys took a girl’s prom glove, and attached an accelerometer to one finger. They also attached 4 buttons to the middle finger. They use an Atmel Mega 32 to interprate the signals from the sensors on the glove and to create the RS232 serial output for the computer.” Link. See previous “mouse glove”.
Sound card based signal generators on Linux
Matthew writes “Previously, E-DSP visited the possibility of using your sound card as a signal/function generator. I was curious about the results, but did not have a Windows machine close by to test it. After some searching, I found a Linux alternative and was able to test the limitations of my Sound Blaster Live!” Link.
Making a Proximity Card
How Waterloo made his own proximity cards – “Lots of companies use proximity cards to control physical access. An employee holds their card within a few inches of the reader; the reader receives a unique id from the card and transmits it to some central computer that tells it whether or not to open the door. This is rather magical, considering that the tag is credit card-thin and contains no battery. The trick is the same as for RFID tags. The reader constantly transmits a rather strong carrier; the tag derives its power and clock from this carrier, kind of like a crystal radio.” Link.
MacMini Portable Project
Peter Green made a portable Mac Mini! “Why the Mac Mini Portable? Well, in short I wanted a machine that was really dinky to just pop in my rucksack, and while the PowerBooks/iBooks are pretty small, they still take up a fair amount of space. I wanted something with a very small screen that was more or less hand-held, and mac just don’t do that [yet].” [via] Link.
10 Guides for a New Ubuntu User
Jeremiah writes “As a new Linux user, there is a sense of frustration. You can’t seem to get anything working correctly or you just don’t know how. I know exactly how that feels, and after spending countless hours searching forums and guides, I have compiled a list of the ten guides I find most useful as a new Ubuntu user (and Linux user for that matter). So, here they are, not listed in any particular order.” Thanks Jason! Link.
