Handy how to from Bob Bilson on Instructables “Need to ship out something, but you don’t have a shipping box? Check out the copy machine. Grab an empty copy paper box and follow these instructions.” Link.
Nice outdoor webcam installation – “…the final webcam installation including painting to comply with our homeowners’ association. You may need a stepladder and a piece of cardboard to “frame” (as a movie director might) your intended view from a workable location in space. If you’re lucky, you just attach your cam housing to an existing surface. Get a sense of the angle of coverage afforded by your camera before you do this. High school geometry and its study of triangles may be finally useful to you here.” [via] Link.
Mac writes “A while back, I happened upon the application note “Interface to Optical Mouse Sensor” on the Kronos Robotics website. It discusses the use of a sensor from an optical mouse for use in position sensing coprocessor on a robot. The application note did not go beyond the proof-of-concept stage. That is, could the sensor be directly interfaced and controlled? Since I didn’t have easy access to the GE mouse described in the application note, I wanted to see if there were other optical mice available that had an Agilent optical mouse sensor, which I could use in its place. I also wanted to go beyond the proof-of-concept stage and acutally use an optical mouse sensor in a robotics application. Before developing that application, though, I first needed to gain familarity with interfacing to the optical mouse sensor in a Forth environment. This webpage describes the hack I did to a BTC optical mouse to enable direct control of the Agilent (now Avago, see below) ADNS-2610 Optical Mouse Sensor and the Forth code written to control it.” [via] Link.
This is a really clever idea, burn images along with the data on a CDR… Instructable maker Argon writes – “By carefully choosing the right 1s and 0s to burn to a CD, it is possible to burn visible images on normal CD-Rs. These images rely on the fact that the 1s and 0s created by pits in the CDs surface reflect light differently.” Link.
Here’s this week’s “cool stuff being made!” – “…animation of the making of a flat panel display. In fact, you’re probably looking at one now. This shows you how once again you are surrounded by manufactured products: cars, food, clothing, flat panel displays. Without manufactured products, the world would be a quiet and empty (and hungry) place.” [via] Link.
Jake posted up an Instructable for our mousebot “Mousebot from Make vol 2 is a fun introduction to robotics. So fun that I’ve created this expanded documentation of a Mousey build from start to finish, with a few extra little tips you won’t find in the mag. This how-to is best understood after reading the original article from page 100 of Make vol 2 however it is probably not required. Mousebot is a simple bot that uses two “eyes” to sense light and then turns towards the light. A single large “whisker” is mounted on the front of the mouse to detect collisions.” Link.
Matthew writes “A project I’m finishing off involves a simple little front end that I’ve decided to implement using some DHTML. As I was reading up on JavaScript’s setTimeout method as part of my DHTML research, an interesting thought crossed my mind: would it be possible to make a strobe light out of that old archaic CRT monitor sitting on my closet floor and such a weak (as in weakly typed) language as JavaScript? Well, I decided to give it a try and it actually worked out pretty well — although it did give me a mild headache after I had the not so keen idea to stare directly at it for a few seconds. Here’s the code you need to make use of that old dust magnet.” Link.
