We have a caffeinated collection of coffee related projects from the pages of MAKE in PDF form, if you have every MAKE you likely don’t need this, but if you don’t – we’ve collected 5 great projects and have them available for $4.99 (if you’re a Tips-N-Tools newsletter subscriber there’s a discount code coming for that so hang tight)…
I’m going to have a post about each project, today’s is: The Coffee Roaster – To experience coffee nirvana, roast your own beans with this cheap, portable coffee roaster.
DIY Coffee collects five hot MAKE magazine projects to supercharge your java:
Home-Build Coffee Roaster
Bottomless Espresso Portafilter
Toaster Tea Popper
Perfect Espresso Temperature Hack
Web-Fired Coffee with X10 Automation
Got a jones for caffeine and technology? Mod your espresso machine to dial in the perfect shot, with precise temperature control and a filter hack that kicks out maximum tasty crema. Roast your own with a hand-built custom coffee roaster. Hack a toaster timer to perfect-brew your tea every time. And fire up your coffee pot from the internet using X10 automation. Using home-grown techniques and off-the-shelf parts, caffeine junkies will find everything they need to overclock the fix from their favorite shade-grown beverage.
It mentions there is a hacked Finder app floating around the web.
I booted up the Mac mini. Copied the AppleTV OS disk image over to it. I also copied the new Finder file to it (note: don’t change the name of the finder file).
I didn’t reinstall the OS – I just took what I had. Before you do anything, I’d enable file sharing, remote access, ssh, the whole thing. That way you should have access to the box after the mod has been done.
I then followed the steps listed at the URL above. So the first two steps were:
cd /Volumes/OSBoot/System/Library/CoreServices/
sudo cp -pr ./Finder.app /Volume/FreshOSX/System/Library/CoreServices/.
The next step, which has you cd to the directory and overwrite the finder file within the Finder.app, I actally did this remotely
To do this, I killed the finder in the Activity Monitor.
I then Connected to the Mac Mini from my Mac pro and made the copy from there. I actually did this from the Mac Pro’s finder.
Then, I returned to the instructions and did:
sudo chown root:wheel Finder
sudo chmod 755 Finder
I finished with the final three terminal commands and rebooted. Works perfectly.
One minor thing, in the instructions, I changed ‘Volume’ to ‘Volumes’ anywhere it referenced the FreshOSX volume. I don’t know if that was an error on their part.
More:
Apple TV running on a Macbook | Apple TV Hacks – [via] Link.
Remember all the fun and glucose syrup flying around with the Mentos + Diet Coke adventures of late 2005? Now you can get this gadget that will help deliver the payload easier – fill it up, pull the string, blammo. Of course this is an easy (re)make, so have at it…
It mentions there is a hacked Finder app floating around the web.
I booted up the Mac mini. Copied the AppleTV OS disk image over to it. I also copied the new Finder file to it (note: don’t change the name of the finder file).
I didn’t reinstall the OS – I just took what I had. Before you do anything, I’d enable file sharing, remote access, ssh, the whole thing. That way you should have access to the box after the mod has been done.
I then followed the steps listed at the URL above. So the first two steps were:
cd /Volumes/OSBoot/System/Library/CoreServices/
sudo cp -pr ./Finder.app /Volume/FreshOSX/System/Library/CoreServices/.
The next step, which has you cd to the directory and overwrite the finder file within the Finder.app, I actally did this remotely
To do this, I killed the finder in the Activity Monitor.
I then Connected to the Mac Mini from my Mac pro and made the copy from there. I actually did this from the Mac Pro’s finder.
Then, I returned to the instructions and did:
sudo chown root:wheel Finder
sudo chmod 755 Finder
I finished with the final three terminal commands and rebooted. Works perfectly.
One minor thing, in the instructions, I changed ‘Volume’ to ‘Volumes’ anywhere it referenced the FreshOSX volume. I don’t know if that was an error on their part.
More:
Apple TV running on a Macbook | Apple TV Hacks – [via] Link.
If you thought motor-racing was all about petrol-heads and champagne, WMG students at the University of Warwick will make you think again.
Eco One is an environmentally-friendly race car with a difference: its shell is made from hemp, the tyres made from potatoes and the brake pads made from cashew nut shells. It also runs entirely on bio-fuels and bio-lubricants.
But its green credentials don’t hold it back on the track. Designed originally with a top speed of 125mph, project manager Ben Wood has ‘tweaked’ the original Formula Student engine and claims he can achieve up to 150mph – given a long straight and a tailwind.
WMG Sends Race Car You Can Grow To Eden Project – [via] Link.
The reactable, is a multi-user electronic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface. Several simultaneous performers share … all » complete control over the instrument by moving physical objects on a luminous table surface. By moving and relating these objects, representing components of a classic modular synthesizer, users can create complex and dynamic sonic topologies, with generators, filters and modulators, in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.
This instrument is being developed by a team of digital luthiers (Sergi Jordà , Martin Kaltenbrunner, Günter Geiger and Marcos Alonso), at the Music Technology Group within the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain.
Ubuntu’s server distribution, with its tiny memory footprint, makes a really decent base setup for a VMware server machine. Using X11, you can even run the console on the server and have it remotely displayed to a Mac desktop (since there isn’t a native Mac console available).
Here’s a decent walkthrough that will quickly take you start to finish through installing the required software on a fresh Ubuntu box, configuring VMware, and administering it from your Mac. Have fun!
The Perfect VMWare server setup (Multi User and Multi Environment…FAST) -Link.
Dick shows you how to make your own rusty nail LED night light!
These blocking oscillator type power supplies work best with ferrite cores, and sometimes they can be hard to locate. Some readers have expressed anxiety over making inductors, and that is understandable since to many, inductors have an aura of mystery about them.
Just to prove that these inductors aren’t magic, or even that critical for that matter, I wound one on a rusty nail that I noticed laying beside the road one day while waiting for a tow truck. It is a 2-1/2 inch (6.5 cm) long flooring nail, which serves as the inductor’s core.
The wire is a twisted pair of #24 solid copper wire that I pulled from a length of CAT-5 (ethernet) cable, which is similar to the wire used to connect telephones inside buildings. I wound 60 turns of the twisted pair in about three layers around the flooring nail, then I connected the start end of one conductor to the finish end of the other conductor and that made it into a 120 turn center tapped inductor.
I connected it to a 2N2222, a 1K resistor, a 1.5 volt penlight cell, and a white LED. Nothing happened. Then, I put a .0027 uf capacitor across the 1 K resistor (it happened to be on the work bench) and the LED came on. Sometimes you need .001 uf or so. The LED glows nicely and the circuit draws 20 milliamps from the AA cell. The waveform on the oscilloscope looks terrible, but the point is that the circuit oscillated with even this rusty nail, and it boosted the output of the 1.5 volt AA cell to over 3 volts peak to drive the LED.
Those who are familiar with some aspects of coil core selection would quickly point out that the eddy currents would be huge since iron has a low resistance compared to ferrite, or air for that matter, and that there would also likely be other types of large losses. The point here is not that you should run out and buy some flooring nails to make LED lamps, but that this circuit was not “designed”, but was thrown together and worked quite readily. If a rusty nail and some telephone wire is enough to light up a white LED, then the inductor is not so critical. So, relax, go buy a ferrite core and get started on your project.
Make contributing editor Bill Gurstelle’s new book, Whoosh Boom Splat – The Garage Warrior Guide to Projectile Shooters is
coming to bookstores today (March 27).
It’s everything you need to know when you’re in the mood to build homemade machines ranging from the high-voltage Night Lighter-36 spud gun to the Jam Jar Jet, the Marshmallow Shooter, and the Yagua Blowgun. Each chapter includes detailed diagrams and supply lists, and simple, step-by-step instructions to help Makers of every skill level achieve impressively results.
The video is really funny, please wear safety glasses.
William Gurstelle: Books / Whoosh Boom Splat – Link.
CRAFT Flickr photo pool member B_Zedan made a really nice monoggle from junk laying around…
Fashioned from some scraps I had around the house, the goggle cup is papier mache the front of the goggle is an aperture from a tele-zoom lens. All the detail junk (except for the wire) are from various cameras and lenses the old man cannibalised. I hand-sewed that strap too, go me.
Reuse old printer ribbons and video tape to make rope! no im not talking about dot matrix ink ribbons {although they will
work it would just be messy} im referring to the one you get from those little photo printers like the canon selphy or the kodak printerdock also the standalone printer kiosks at walmarts across the continent have the same system. im going to show you how to make a machine to do this…
Reuse old printer ribbons and video tape to make rope! – Link.
This design was born out of my fascination of edge-lighting. I love the way light catches the engraved design & jumps out at you seemingly flouting in mid-air.
This particular table was a prototype I built over three years ago while I was working
for a fiber-optics company. (the lighting type of fiber-optics not communication) The company built endoscopes for lighting up the insides of people during surgery. I felt there was more exciting applications for the fiber & so I started innovating.
cre.ations.net – Creation: Color Changing Edge-lit coffee table (hundred dollar bill table) – Link.
