MAKE pal Jason Striegel from blogcadre.com writes “Here’s a telerobotic Mac Mini based on the Pioneer 3at platform. I guess they intend to expand this into a fully autonomous unit that uses lidar and the iSight camera for guidance and obstacle avoidance. Right now they control it over a wireless connection and use ichat to provide a remote video feed”. Link.
Are you tired of answering the phone only to find a telemarketer on the other end and wish you could make them as angry as you feel? Now you can build your own answering system that carries on a virtual conversation with the telemarketer and drives them nuts. The Telecrapper 2000 (TC2K) is a computerized system designed to both intercept incoming Telemarketing calls on the first ring, and then carry on a virtual conversation with the telemarketer. The site also features phone calls the device has carried out with telemarketers. Thanks Jay! Link.
Raphael Assenat writes “Since I got my webcam, I never used it for videoconferencing. Instead, I tried to do many cool things with it, like infra-red photography, security, and automated 360 degree photography of objects using a stepper”. I really like the stepper motor project (source and schematics included)…Link.
Neat project from Kaufmann’s lab…I found a USB-IDE cable online that would allow me to build my own external hard drive. Since I had a spare 40GB drive at home, I had everything I needed except for something to stuff it all in. After thinking about it for a bit, I decided to see if it would work inside of an old gutted tape recorder. This project was a lot of fun, and ended up costing me less than $20, since I had an unused drive. Thanks Brad! Link.
Here are a few nice PDFs with plans for – a Coat Hanger, Lazy Mans Scroll Saw bench, Home Made Scroll Saw-Part 1 / Part-II – a working, person powered, scroll saw. Link.
Anthony writes “Hey guys, we just announced the winners of the “The Great MacMod Challenge 2005 Sponsored By dealmac.com.” The competition was incredibly fierce this year with over 30 mods. These mods ranged from a Mac Mini installed into a Millenium Falcon to a hand painted hieroglyphics-inspired PowerMac to the world’s fastest overclocked Bondi iMac”. Many of the winners have been spotlighted on MAKE, congrats Mac Mod Makers! Link.
Tom Bridge writes: In the aftermath of Katrina, with our T1 gone in our Jackson, MS office, we had to create a simple dialup router that could share one connection across many devices. This is how we did it. For less than $200. In an hour. Link
