wireless.gumph.org has a how to on making a small WiFi antenna – “A small antenna to boost the signal of a laptop wireless card, that can be stuck to the back of the laptop screen. The design is the same as for the larger homemade antenna, but uses thin RG58 cable and is only 2 sectors long. The size was chosen so it could be housed inside the tube of an old pen, to provide rigidity and protection to the antenna.” Thanks Star! Link.
Ryan Clarke from the Parallax support forums is hacking the Sharper image chimp head – “Getting the skin off isn’t that bad…it’s a stubborn rubber cement type glue…Opening the skull only requires the removal a few screws in the back of the skull…the two touch sensors on the back part of the skull (top and back of head) are the only wires you need to be careful of when opening the skull…The touch sensors scope out in a very similar fashion to the flexiforce sensors (Parallax part #30056). Running the flex sensors in the same circuit with the same code as the FlexiforceSimple.BS2 (available on the product page above) you get a distinct 0 or 1 for output (with a bit of button bounce at the beginning of a press)- It does not appear as though the sensors will be useful for ‘analog’ input proportional to the strength of the touch, but I have not verified this as of yet.” Link.
Here it is…3D-printing a SecondLife / WoW character, and mashup into Google Earth! “OGLE (i.e. OpenGLExtractor) is a software package by Eyebeam R&D that allows for the capture and re-use of 3D geometry data from 3D graphics applications running on Microsoft Windows. It works by observing the data flowing between 3D applications and the system’s OpenGL library, and recording that data in a standard 3D file format. In other words, a ‘screen grab’ or ‘view source’ operation for 3D data.” [via] Link.
Bcmeikle has a great way of making cheap(er) QuickTime video panoramic movies… “For some time now I’ve been making video panoramas but how to capture them has remained a mystery. Here’s a great page that shows a ton of panoramic video systems. However when we talk about the QTVR community, we want fairly inexpensive, and it has to work on a macintosh computer….” [via] Link.
Great idea – check out Edward Vielmetti’s Superpatronbot – “Another evening’s work produced this working (but buggy!) Google Talk robot that looks things up in the Ann Arbor District Library catalog. Technology used: Jose Nazario’s from Ann Arbor’s DuckyLib library to do the RSS parsing of the AADL’s catalog, and Perry Lorier’s confbot (from Wakaito, New Zealand) to handle all of the Google Jabber stuff.” Thanks Brian! Link. Don’t forget our MAKEbot contest is still going on!
Fredrik writes – “There are lots of CPUs on the market that can be run at a lower voltage than what they are specified to. Especially the kind of low power consuming CPUs found in laptops. You’ll be surprised when you see the results of undervolting your CPU. In this article we will look further on how you can undervolt the CPU of a modern laptop without loosing performance or stability. Our test-system is an Acer Aspire 5021WLMi which appear to be a good computer to undervolt.” [via] Link.
Here’s a homemade remote control pan and tilt system mounted on a competition class RC car. All controlled wirelessly, with the video piped into a head mounted display. We’ve all seen those minicameras mounted on RC cars but never like this. Awesome mod! Link.
