Say goodbye to the bank-breaking audio/video cables at your local electronics superstore. Save your money and build out your home theater DIY style. With a total running time of 45 minutes, Kevin and Dan talk to a broadcast engineer to demonstrate how to make your own high end A/V cables for a fraction of the cost and a “monster” savings. Link.
This new toool is called The Car Whisperer and allows people equipped with a Linux Laptop and a directional antenna to inject audio to, and record audio from bypassing cars that have an unconnected Bluetooth handsfree unit running. Since many manufacturers use a standard passkey which often is the only authentication that is needed to connect. [via] Link.
In MAKE 03 we have a great welding primer- If you need metal stuck together, there is no quicker path than buying a portable 110-volt wire-feed welder. Mr. Jalopy’s introduction to welding will help you understand the process and show how you can be a welder by the end of the weekend–and end up with a couple of jigs for the effort. Link. And now you can share your welds with the goodweld / badweld tags on Flickr!
Nice interview on Gizmodo…Artist Jonathon Keats is taking one long photo. His project, a pinhole camera that is taking one continuous picture of a room in the Hotel des Arts in San Francisco, is a mixture of uber-low-tech and ultra-high concept geekiness. Link.
Dan Corkery writes “Being the geeks that we are, we always come up with some sort of project to bring up to the lake and play with. This year, two weeks before vacation, we decided to build an Underwater ROV. For those not familiar, an ROV is a Remotely Operated Vehicle. Generally “real” ROVs cost anywhere from $8,000 up to Millions of dollars. We had two weeks and a $100 budget. Usually they have high-resolution camera systems and high powered thrusters to maneuver. We had two weeks and a $100 budget. However, the results were pretty good”. Link.
“I thought this was interesting. Up till now, ZigBee was only available as a chipset or some rudimentary modules. Now regular schmucks like me that don’t want to mess with a soldering iron can use ZigBee and see if it sucks or not. These radios have a range of almost a mile and cost less than $100. Not bad since nobody else seems to offer anything like this (yet). Now I can get my laptop to communicate with some of my robotics projects without an RS-232 umbilical cord.” (WikiPedia’s page on ZigBee a is a good way to figure out whether this is interesting to you; in short, a low-power, medium-range radio spec for all sorts of interesting uses.) Link.
The ability to climb and descend stairs is one of the unexpected behaviors of this new home-brew off-road autonomous robot platform. The robot has a custom chassis and uses standard suspension and drive components scavanged from old R/C monster trucks. [