Randy Sarafan writes:

The nice thing about IKEA furniture is that it is cheap and easy to hack. In other words, lets say that you were to buy two cheap $30 Gorm shelving units and assembled them to discover them that one was crooked. Well then, it would be really easy to spend an afternoon converting the crooked one into a solid, stylish and symmetric bookshelf bench. As you probably just guessed, this Instructable will show you how to convert a Gorm shelving unit into a bookshelf bench. With a few extra peices of hardware and a couple of basic power tools, you could be on your way to relaxation and organization all at the same time.

MAKE subscriber Justin fused the convenience of digital music with the feel and playback functionality of a cassette -

It is a cassette tape adapter and a micro usb port hooked up to a tiny mp3 player that I picked up at target. Its a simple build and only took an evening. Its an on going project I started a while back.

Want to rock out, but forget to bring your instrument? Then you might want to check out Instrumentube, a collection of YouTube-based instruments that you play by dragging the video time slider to match up to the correct note. I can't imagine this being a very efficient way to play music, but it is a pretty funny hack.

[Thanks, Jacob!]

Master iPhone unlocker George Hotz aka GeoHot has done it again. Apparently the current iPhone 3G/3GS baseband has been successfully cracked and new unlock code titled blacksn0w will soon become available through the blackr1n jailbreak. [via iPhoneSchool]

Have a broken robotic toy that you want to bring back from the dead? Why not follow the lead of Morten Skogly, and re-animate it with a toy synthesizer? The FrankenDog looks like a good way to get some use out of an old toy, at least until you get around to pulling the motors out of it. I like the control 'switches' built by sticking conductive tape at the edge of the plastic piano keys.

RFID card readers becoming passé? Maybe what you need to guard the door to your high-tech lair is a secret knock detecting door lock. Using an Arduino and a bunch of parts found around the lab, Steve Hoefer built a device that unlocks your door when it receives a certain knock pattern. It works by counting the time between successive knocks, and can be re-programmed at the touch of a button.

Of course, this system is susceptible to a replay attack, because anyone can listen to the knock pattern and then know how to get in. If you are planning to use something like this, I would recommend either incorporating a timestamp into the message, or using a series of one time knocks, in order to make it harder to break into. Actually, that might make it more secure than a regular lock.

From Instructables user Eric Kingston comes this Arduino-controlled Silly String shooting pumpkin. It's motion-activated, makes a Goblin-esque cackling noise, and Tweets a report each time it squirts another victim. Eric also wins a thousand internet video style points for making his whole point in five seconds with no talking!

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

Check out this cool Android-based head mounted display. Andrew Lim of recombu.com used an HTC Magic running Google Street View, safety goggles, and some cardboard to fashion one of the coolest HMD this side of Lawnmowerman. [Thanks, Andrew!]

Have some extra soda cans laying around the lab, that are taking up too much space? Instead of just smashing them with your boot, why not build an electromagnetic crushing machine to implode them, using a high voltage source and some large capacitors? That's exactly what Bob Davis has been doing with his can crushers.

Actually, I can think of a lot of reasons why one wouldn't want to do this, especially the big safety one. It looks cool though, and slightly less complicated than the coin shrinker. [via hacked gadgets]

Here's another awesome project by Vadim Ryazanov of Let's Make Robots. Called Mr. Wake, this robot has the duty of protecting its alarm clock from any bleary-eyed, would-be assailants. Instead of running away after its snooze button has been pressed, like the Clocky, this 'bot engages a homebrew IR sensor as soon as the alarm goes off, and takes off if it detects anything even trying to get near the button.

I love the choice of building materials, especially the frame made of heat-formed plastic pens. Nice work!

Zibri did some investigative hacking with the Force Trainer (brainwave controlled toy) and posted a basic interface schematic using a MAX3233 to interface with his PC via serial. It turns out the EEG headset is sending out data as ASCII characters @ 57600 baud - should make for some quick and easy hacking! Time to add mind control to those microcontroller projects.

MAKE subscriber thom writes in to tell us about Marc Fischer's ambitious project to do something creative every day, for a year, and document it. One of his latest projects is a DIY MIDI footpedal, made from a pocket-sized MIDI keyboard and some blocks of wood. I would not have considered doing this, but it looks like it came out really nice. He doesn't mention it in his write-up, but an interesting side effect of re-purposing the keyboard in this manner is that the foot pedals will be velocity sensitive, opening up some new possibilities for control.

This is just one of his excellent projects, he has also made drone boxes, a music box, a felt monome case, a light speaker, and lots of wonderful photographs.

Back in 2008, I participated in the Thing-A-Day project, which is a similar idea but only lasts for a single month. I nearly drove myself crazy trying to make an electronics/physical computing project every day, but it was definitely a great way to force myself to actually work on things. I would recommend a project like this to anyone who just needs that extra bit of motivation to actually start getting things done. Good luck on finishing the year strong, Marc!

The "tools" section of media artist Karl Klomp's website documents an impressive amount of bent, hacked and homebrew hardware for video manipulation. Devices such as the Failter (seen above)series go through a number of incarnations while Karl experiments with different hardware and uncovers its glitch-ability. The retro-simple feel of the enclosures give give it all a nicely 'scientific' almost medical feel. Be sure to check out his device gallery/ project list for more examples. Thanks to Becky for pointing this one out!

In need of a way to transmit a video signal to an aging antennae-input TV set, John rigged up a working RF modulator from salvaged parts (plus 5V supply) -

I decided not to build my modulator from first principles. A simple design with a UHF cavity oscillator and simple sound and vision carrier and modulation circuits is not impossible to make using parts from a scrap TV set, but when so many set top devices already have a modulator built into them why bother? Instead I lifted the RF modulator from a scrap Salora satellite receiver I picked up at a radio rally.
[…]
To power this modulator I built a simple 5 volt regulator using the ubiquitous 7805 IC. I simply soldered a TO220 heatsink to the module case and built the circuit around it. My choice of capacitor values was based on those I had to hand. I also included an LED to serve as a pilot light to indicate that the unit was turned on.

John Boiles, he of the iPod-controlled RC car, also produced this sweet wirelessly controlled light dimmer, which he demonstrates in this video, controlling different sets of X-mas lights by shaking his iPod. See it work around 1:40, then be sure to check out the dance party at 2:40. The iPod is enclosed in the "law book" prop everyone is shaking around, together with their booties, while they rock out to vintage Bon Jovi, et. al.

More Dorkbot Austin goodness! John Boiles demonstrated this radio-controlled car steered using his iPod's built-in accelerometer via its built-in WiFi transmitter. All you have to do is tilt the iPod, and the car goes. It starts to move around 1:10.

Gordan Savicic and Gottfried Haider of DSbrut fame have tipped us off that they've just released their DS Bluetooth adapter for the Nintendo DS.

Almost two years in the making, we're happy to finally release our DS Bluetooth adapter. The tiny Slot-1 cartridge allows you to hook up the Nintendo DS wirelessly with other devices such as GPS-receivers, robots and so forth. Today we're making all materials of the project openly available, including the schematics and a GPL-licensed software library for the Nintendo DS, because we believe in open hardware design and want to encourage collaboration in the hardware hacking community.

If you've got a homebrew Nintendo DS project that we should know about leave a link in the comments.

Hpropman presents a group of four tutorials about how to connect common motion detecting devices to a microcontroller for triggering haunt props. He has separate tutorials for flood light motion sensors, wall switch motion sensors, X10 wireless motion sensors, and Parallax motion sensors.

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

This video by YouTuber electricunicycle, while dark, shows off a pretty sweet haunt prop he made by attaching a frame, fabric, and lighting to an electric wheelchair base he adapted for radio control.

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

Here's a neat idea: using the standard microphone and speakers that are built into most recent laptops, researchers from Northwestern and University of Michigan have developed a sonar system to detect when a user is near the computer. Why is this interesting? Well, the idea is that it can be used to turn your computer screen off as soon as you walk away, rather than waiting the typical 10 or 20 minutes for the screensaver to kick on. It's a pretty neat idea, especially since it doesn't require any extra components, however I wonder how much power the sonar system itself will draw.

[via slashdot]

Josh Klein developed a machine that trains crows to trade coins for peanuts. Literally, for peanuts. So you fill this thing with peanuts and set it out, say, in a public park, and the crows will scour the ground for loose change, carry it to the machine, and drop it in a slot in exchange for food. The project, dubbed "CrowBox," made a big splash when he unveiled it back in 2007. Now he's made the complete plans for the CrowBox freely available online so you can roll your own. And there's no reason you couldn't train your fly-monkeys-fly to gather other crow-portable objects. Twenty-dollar bills? Keys? iPods? Human eyes? The possibilities are endless. Set one up at the beach! Train seagulls to trade whole wallets for pre-shucked oysters!

Motorola's new Android UI has been ported to the HTC G1. The accompanying video of the unofficial build shows off many of the user enhancements shipping with the newer Motorola Android based phones. [via Android and Me]

Circuit-bending/music machine-building maestro Gijs Gieskes has posted the details of his latest creation, a synth that uses the SEGA video RAM as an audio source (after it's been slowed down via a binary counter).

Check out his use of magnetic patch bays to switch up the sounds. His tutorial on how to make the patch cords can be found here.

Video Ram Synth 1

More:
Make: Online's coverage of Gijs Gieskes' instruments

If you're thinking of building your own wort chiller for homebrewing, you might benefit from seeing how Instructables user iPodGuy installs a ball valve on a cooler.

This project is kind of mad, but the results could be pretty useful. Instructables user catwood guides you through the process of building a wood lathe from mostly discarded parts. Along the way you will need things like the motor from a washing machine and the frame from a bike. It might make sense to buy or construct a more sturdy piece of equipment if you plan to make wood turning a full time hobby, but for light duty projects I could definitely see this coming in hand.

How do you photograph a 300' tall tree in a dense forest with no clear sight lines? Wildlife photographer Michael Nichols did it by taking a bunch of close-ups using a special camera rig and stitching them together digitally. NPR has the full story. [via Hack-a-Day]

Cool post over on Hack-A-Day about corn maze entrepreneur Scott Skelly, shown above with his trusty GPS-enabled riding lawn mower. Scott explains his maize-maze-making process thusly:

A maze starts as nothing more than a large field of corn. The design is created using a computer, then translated into GPS coordinates by fitting it into a field whose outline coordinates were previously captured on foot. Once the field coordinates are reconciled with the map design the data is used in one of two ways; the routes can be made by tilling under a path when the corn is very young, or more commonly it is cut lawn-mower-style when the corn is anywhere from knee-high to full grown. This corn-meets-satellite hack makes for a whole lot of fun!

The Melting Pot is an older 'visualizer' project, however it was way ahead of it's time. Developed back in 2001 by Itiro Siio and Noyuri Mima, it's purpose is to bridge the physical distance between a team that is scattered across an office building together by bringing the them together using sweet, sweet coffee. Rather than an audio or visual cue, however, they opted to appeal to the olfactory system, and developed a system to simultaneously broadcast the siren's call of fresh brew to the whole team. The idea is that everyone would subconsciously smell the fine flavors, decide to grab some coffee, and then meet up in the break room.

To accomplish this, they hacked a wireless transmitter into the office coffee machine, so that it would send out a signal when a fresh pot of coffee is ready. Next, they built a bunch of aroma generators that start releasing a coffee aroma when a ready signal is received. The aroma generators are pretty simple- just a fan that blows over a couple of bags of instant coffee.

I've worked in several environments where this would have been a great way to bring my team together. Anyone up for a remake? Have better ideas about what kinds of smells to use to subtly influence people?

Michael Linnell e-mailed us these shots showing a clever hack he uses to bend small plastic strips at his soldering station. The soldering pencil is reversed in the holder to position its barrel near the surface of the strip held in the "helping hands." Radiant heat from the barrel softens the plastic along a parallel line for folding. Michael adds, "Just make sure you leave about 1/4 to 1/8 inch of air space between the pencil and the plastic. Both of the items used for this bender are standard Radio Shack items."

Zipit hacker Hunter Davis runs through installing Linux on the low-cost WiFi connected IM device in his latest tutorial. Complete with Fluxbox window manager, mouse, audio and wireless, the Zipit can be transformed into an inexpensive Linux mobile device that begs further modification.

[via hackaday]