Cute project – Recently many kind of robot contests have being opened and some interesting reports of the challenge are found on the web. The Line Following is a kind of the robot contests to vie running speed on the line. I build a tiny line following robot which can run on the desk, moving the key board aside will do. It is for only a personal toy reduced its size less than one fifth compared to typical line following robots, not in formura. Link.
It looks like the CVS camera has some more secrets – you can just about double the record time Link and you can also double the resolution Link [via]. The camerahacks forums have both HOW TOs and a lot of other great information for hacking up the CVS digital video camera. See our HOW TO here as well.
Nice hack for duping slides- I started this because I have about 2000 35mm slides and nearly that many color negatives I’d like to convert to digital images, and many of them are 30 years old or more and starting to deteriorate. My first attempt involved purchasing a slide scanner from the-store-that-must-not-be-named, but it took like 3 to 4 minutes to prescan and then scan to file, and then it usually botched the exposure or the color balance. I realized that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life scanning slides in this manner, so I started thinking about other solutions…[via] Link.
Some PSP games check to see if the PSP has the latest firmware, since we don’t want to update to 2.0 and lose the ability to run games and applications we make, here’s a tool that does a tricksie on the PSP game- This is described as the First Firmware Trick for Games that need Firmware 1.52 to run on your PSP and Cant Run UPDATER 1.52 or 2.0. The System thinks it’s a PSP v1.52 ,v1.0 ,v2.0 even if its a v1.5 or 1.0. Link.
Adding an external antenna to the PSP…we are going to examine the possibilities of increasing the PSP’s wireless signal strength to make it more adaptable to situations where you might need a few extra dBs to get that quality connection. Link.
If you have a cat, kids and want to make a fun project together- here’s a simple “kitty condo”. Might go well with the VCR cat feeder from MAKE volume 03. My cat tends to get the most excited when we break out the laser beam, but boxes with holes cut out and some cat nip have the same effect too. Link.
Older project, but I really like this one- I pulled the knobs off of an Etch A Sketch and attached it to two stepper motors which in turn are attached to the parallel port of a computer. This gives one the ability to control the plotter’s movements with a standard mouse or analog joystick (more intuitive interfaces than the knobs). Having a computer in the loop also allows one to record what movements are done, so one can edit them and play them back. This robotic device is also capable of erasing the Etch A Sketch by flipping the whole contraption upside down and tilting it back and forth. The assembly has been carefully counterbalanced so that it only takes a tiny motor to flip it. A pair of mercury switches let the computer know which way is up, so that the board can be rotated to the correct positions. Link.
