Make: Online: January 2006 Archives

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Archives: January 2006

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January 30, 2006

HOW TO - Powering Nixie Tubes...

Ian's new Instructable looks great for Nixie tube hackers, but be careful this one requires a lot of care. He writes "This SMPS boosts low voltage (5-20 volts) to the high voltage needed to drive nixie tubes (170-200 volts). Be warned: even though this small circuit can be operated on batteries/low voltage wall-worts, the output is more than enough to kill you!" Link.

Radio controlled paintball shooting tank made from printer parts

Check out Steve's amazing paint ball shooting, RC controlled tank made from printer parts. There are dozens of photos on how he made it and best of all Steve talks about the different parts, problems that needed to be solved and documents some clever solutions to power, move and use compressed air for the paint balls.[via] Link.

HOW TO - XBox Headtracking system....

Ryan writes in with an awesome Xbox hack! "An Xbox headtracker system - Built for around $6.00. I interfaced directly to a xbox controller pcb with photo resistors. Using some cardboard and tape and a led head mounted flashlight and some wire i made a useable headtracking system that is based on using the right thumbstick as an interface as it is usually for camera control in third person games, or direction in first person shooters." Link.

Toys from Trash

Paul writes - "Educator and inventor Arvind Gupta makes fun and educational toys from trash -- a spinning top out of a film can top and a pen, a cute animal from a mango seed, a train set from batteries. More that are indescribable by the written word, but clearly elegant and fun." Link.

HOW TO - Fix your old NES

DIY live has some good tips on fixing that old NES "I took apart my nintendo, and found the 72 pin connector. I took my smallest flat head screw-driver and pried every pin up a little. Over time, they had lost their springiness (I don't know if that is a word, but it describes what I am talking about). This is a pretty good fix. It may not be the best, but it works. Another thing to help out is to clean the pins of your old cartridge. You can take a wooden pencil with the red eraser, and rub it on the pins of the cartridge. Make sure you get all of the eraser off of the cartridge." Thanks Star! Link.

Bluetooth Accelerometer

A few folks emailed about this, so here's one I spotted - "This is a small wireless sensor platform providing a bluetooth SPP link to three axes of accelerometer data. The accelerometers are sampled by a PIC microcontroller (onboard ADC) at roughly 100Hz (rate can be changed via firmware). Data from the ADC conversion is sent to a remote computer using the PIC's UART in conjunction with a drop-in bluetooth serial part. Even with two dual-axis accelerometers onboard there are up to 17 free I/O lines and two additional ADC channels depending on the device configuration. Three sockets provide access to all PIC signals. Over-the-air programming allows for easy firmware updates and rapid prototyping without the need to have a PIC programmer or special cable. Schematics, parts lists, and firmware sources are available online." Link.

HOW TO - Make a Stereo Miniature Microphone and Battery Module...

Here are two great how-tos from the Sony mini disc forums "How to build a high quality stereo / binaural miniature microphone Required parts: - 2 omnidirectional miniature electret microphone capsules (get the best ones you can find / afford - your selection will have a major influence on the sound quality) - 3.5 mm stereo connector with cable, preferrably shielded - a few inches of heat shrinkable tubing, slightly larger diameter than the capsules" Link.

HOW TO - IR remote control

Sans writes "The cheapest way to remotely control a device within a visible range is via Infra-Red light. Almost all audio and video equipment can be controlled this way nowadays. Due to this wide spread use the required components are quite cheap, thus making it ideal for us hobbyists to use IR control for our own projects. This part of my knowledge base will explain the theory of operation of IR remote control, and some of the protocols that are in use in consumer electronics." Link.

What is Asterisk? SYSTM video!

New SYSTM! - "What is Asterisk? Asterisk is an insanely powerful, yet easy to use, open source voip telephony toolkit (server software) that runs on virtually any platform. It allows anyone to manage VoIP services in their own home in more powerful ways than the most expensive PBX (public branch exchange). For example, it can serve as a gateway from a VoIP service to your copper phone lines, forward calls to your mobile device from wherever you are, allow you to create VoIP connections to anyone on the Internet, manage voicemail, prompts ... a virtually limitless capability depending on how far you want to take it." [via] Link.

SRL Shop Photos

Scott writes "Here's an inside look at the legendary Survival Research Labs shop where they create the robots and machines for their amazing shows. It's been at it's current San Francisco location since 1982, but will soon have to move." Link.

Giving a PowerPoint Presentation in the virtual world...

Andrew writes "If you ever plan to give a talk or presentation in Second Life, you might want to back yourself up with something like a Microsoft(R) PowerPoint(R) presentation. The problem here is that you can't import a PowerPoint(R) presentation into Second Life. Except you can. PowerPoint(R) allows you to export presentation slides as GIF, JPEG, or PNG files. To give your presentation in Second Life, you need to export all the frames as JPEG files. Next, upload the frames to your inventory -- this will cost you L$10 per image, so make sure you have enough for the whole presentation." Link.

HOW TO - Make Shipping Case From Copy Paper Box

Handy how to from Bob Bilson on Instructables "Need to ship out something, but you don't have a shipping box? Check out the copy machine. Grab an empty copy paper box and follow these instructions." Link.

The Ultimate iSight installation, monitor your back yard set-up

Nice outdoor webcam installation - "...the final webcam installation including painting to comply with our homeowners' association. You may need a stepladder and a piece of cardboard to "frame" (as a movie director might) your intended view from a workable location in space. If you're lucky, you just attach your cam housing to an existing surface. Get a sense of the angle of coverage afforded by your camera before you do this. High school geometry and its study of triangles may be finally useful to you here." [via] Link.

BTC Optical Mouse Hack

Mac writes "A while back, I happened upon the application note "Interface to Optical Mouse Sensor" on the Kronos Robotics website. It discusses the use of a sensor from an optical mouse for use in position sensing coprocessor on a robot. The application note did not go beyond the proof-of-concept stage. That is, could the sensor be directly interfaced and controlled? Since I didn't have easy access to the GE mouse described in the application note, I wanted to see if there were other optical mice available that had an Agilent optical mouse sensor, which I could use in its place. I also wanted to go beyond the proof-of-concept stage and acutally use an optical mouse sensor in a robotics application. Before developing that application, though, I first needed to gain familarity with interfacing to the optical mouse sensor in a Forth environment. This webpage describes the hack I did to a BTC optical mouse to enable direct control of the Agilent (now Avago, see below) ADNS-2610 Optical Mouse Sensor and the Forth code written to control it." [via] Link.

January 29, 2006

Burning visible images onto CD-Rs with data (beta)

This is a really clever idea, burn images along with the data on a CDR... Instructable maker Argon writes - "By carefully choosing the right 1s and 0s to burn to a CD, it is possible to burn visible images on normal CD-Rs. These images rely on the fact that the 1s and 0s created by pits in the CDs surface reflect light differently." Link.

January 28, 2006

HOW TO - Make a Flat-Panel Display

Here's this week's "cool stuff being made!" - "...animation of the making of a flat panel display. In fact, you're probably looking at one now. This shows you how once again you are surrounded by manufactured products: cars, food, clothing, flat panel displays. Without manufactured products, the world would be a quiet and empty (and hungry) place." [via] Link.

January 27, 2006

HOW TO - Make a robot from an old computer mouse

Jake posted up an Instructable for our mousebot "Mousebot from Make vol 2 is a fun introduction to robotics. So fun that I've created this expanded documentation of a Mousey build from start to finish, with a few extra little tips you won't find in the mag. This how-to is best understood after reading the original article from page 100 of Make vol 2 however it is probably not required. Mousebot is a simple bot that uses two "eyes" to sense light and then turns towards the light. A single large "whisker" is mounted on the front of the mouse to detect collisions." Link.

HOW TO - Make a Strobe Out of a Monitor...

Matthew writes "A project I'm finishing off involves a simple little front end that I've decided to implement using some DHTML. As I was reading up on JavaScript's setTimeout method as part of my DHTML research, an interesting thought crossed my mind: would it be possible to make a strobe light out of that old archaic CRT monitor sitting on my closet floor and such a weak (as in weakly typed) language as JavaScript? Well, I decided to give it a try and it actually worked out pretty well -- although it did give me a mild headache after I had the not so keen idea to stare directly at it for a few seconds. Here's the code you need to make use of that old dust magnet." Link.

Translating Japanese Crafts

Ningyo or Kokeshi? If you've seen our post last week on Japanese craft books, you may have also found a lot of Japanese craft sites along the way, but have no idea what they are saying. Check out Makewrite's full Japanese craft translation guide and how to use Google Translate to see your what your favorite Japanese craft sites are sayin'. Makewrite says, "It may actually make less sense translated into English than it did in Japanese, but that's half the fun." Link.

How to build an amplifier in less than 2$?

Refik writes "Why do we need Amplifiers? How to build a simple one? LM 741 - You have some output source (for example an analog sensor) where the voltage is very low, just few mV (millivolts), and you would like to measure the output with your ADC (Analog to Digital converter) and with the results do some calculations with your MCU (Microcontroller) or some other device. The values the ADC gives you are all almost the same because its bit resolution is too small to show you any differences between the different states of the sensor." Link.

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