Talking Fish Hack
You know those hilarious/ridiculous singing animatronic mounted fish? Marty Vona gives full instructions for how to make one utter any audio you want, based on a $9 chipcorder and a $7 microcontroller. Link.
Month: April 2005
The WoodCube
The “Woodcube” contains a Super NES, a Playstation and a Nintendo 64. The external housing is an actual wood cube, in all its unfinished and splintery glory with mitered out areas for the games and CDs. The wood antennae on the top are a nice touch. It’s also for sale on eBay Sweden now. Link.
Monochrome Digital Picture Frame
Here’s a pretty fun project that turns an old Macintosh PowerBook 100 into a monochrome digital photo frame. I really like the look of the photos on the screen mixed in with the regular photo frames. If you plan on doing this the project lists the software and power on solutions needed to get it working which may save you some hassle. Link.
The World’s Simplest Radio Jammer
Probably not a good idea to try this out depending on where you live, etc.. etc.. here’s the “world’s simplest radio jammer”. The project uses a 100 MHz crystal which I haven’t seen, the page goes on to say that it was procured out of some old circuit board from the 90s. Link.
Game Boy Camera Parallel Port Interface
Fun Gameboy accessory project– The Game Boy Camera uses a cheap CMOS image sensor with a resolution of 128*123 and an analogue monochrome output. This page shows how to connect it to a standard non-bidirectional, non-ECP, non-EPP PC parallel port, with 5 bits per pixel, compared to the Game Boy’s 2 bits dithered. The circuit described here uses only the small PCB in the swivelling part of the camera, which contains the AR chip, lens assembly and pretty much nothing else. No Game Boy involved. Link.
Kitchen Flickr Photo Frame Project
Doing the dishes is really boring- but I think I have something to help pass the time. A Flickr photo frame to view photos from friends and family. It’s not too hard to find cheap old or broken Tablet PCs on eBay for under $300, and some have a swivel around screen that can be tucked up and away. For now I’m working on the best way to mount it and using VNC to set the slideshows. Also on the list- a full screen RSS viewer to read headlines.
Latest on the PEZ MP3 Project
I check the PEZ MP3 blog about once a week to see where the project is at. It’s a fascinating journal of a stay at home Dad who has a dream, the passion and persistence to bring a product to market he thought up. This week, Samsung bumps the inventor for someone bigger and some really big company seems to be courting the developer with a crazy amount of orders, but then it goes quiet. I hope Samsung comes around since their chip support OGG Vorbis.
