Great Maker project for CD burning automation – “Building some sort of gadget that changes the CDs in my cd tray is something I have often thought about. Mostly in the context of ripping my CD collection or burning a backup of my 5 gig photo collection. My first thought was to come up with something extremely simple, with no electronics. Ideally, the motion of the cd tray would trip some sort of mechanism that would eject the CD from the tray and insert the next one. After months of thinking, I still hadn’t thought of a mechanism that had a hope of actually working.”Link.
And we’re back! PSPupdates is cranking out the PSP goodness! – “That’s right, the day we’ve all been waiting for has finally arrived! Thanks to the fantastic work by our forum moderator Fanjita and his coding companion Ditlew, it is now possible to play vast amounts of homebrew programs and emulators on every PSP in the world, including those with 2.60 Firmware! Thanks to their monumental achievement, every PSP in the world is capable of playing homebrew!” [via] Link.
Here’s a how to on making a head mounted camera from a Neuros MPEG4 Recorder…“The AdventureCAM project started because we needed a way to hike and shoot video footage at the same time. We are constantly reworking this setup, but the basic configuration is pretty much the same (digital storage, remote camera, remote trigger, backpack). Our most recent update to this setup is to replace the tape-based DV Camcorder with a solid state recording mechanism.” [via] Link. I found a Tony Hawk low res camera on sale for $30 at Gamespot in Seattle, it’s not freat quality but I took it apart for a project, worked ok…
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.
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.
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.
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.