Each year in Munich the recorder races are held- Walkman’s and Boom Boxes are modified to become racing cars to see which one can make it down a 15m gym floor, all by using the tape guts as their means of propulsion. More about this year’s throw down here and here are some photos from the 2004 races.
Music Thing has a post about a DIY Road-Cone amplifier. While the creator of the project admits it doesn’t sound quite good, it is very loud. I think this might spark some ideas, perhaps a set of road cones that yell at drivers if they’re going to fast or ones that help teach driver’s ed students how to parallel park by telling you how far away you are and saying “ouch” if you hit them. Maybe not. Link.
You know those hilarious/ridiculous singing animatronic mounted fish? Marty Vona gives full instructions for how to make one utter any audio you want, based on a $9 chipcorder and a $7 microcontroller. Link.
The “Woodcube” contains a Super NES, a Playstation and a Nintendo 64. The external housing is an actual wood cube, in all its unfinished and splintery glory with mitered out areas for the games and CDs. The wood antennae on the top are a nice touch. It’s also for sale on eBay Sweden now. Link.
Here’s a pretty fun project that turns an old Macintosh PowerBook 100 into a monochrome digital photo frame. I really like the look of the photos on the screen mixed in with the regular photo frames. If you plan on doing this the project lists the software and power on solutions needed to get it working which may save you some hassle. Link.
Probably not a good idea to try this out depending on where you live, etc.. etc.. here’s the “world’s simplest radio jammer”. The project uses a 100 MHz crystal which I haven’t seen, the page goes on to say that it was procured out of some old circuit board from the 90s. Link.
Fun Gameboy accessory project– The Game Boy Camera uses a cheap CMOS image sensor with a resolution of 128*123 and an analogue monochrome output. This page shows how to connect it to a standard non-bidirectional, non-ECP, non-EPP PC parallel port, with 5 bits per pixel, compared to the Game Boy’s 2 bits dithered. The circuit described here uses only the small PCB in the swivelling part of the camera, which contains the AR chip, lens assembly and pretty much nothing else. No Game Boy involved. Link.
