Last weekend we laser etched 3 more Powerbooks. We etched two 15″ Powerbooks and a 12″ – this time we etched a very cool bunny infused Tsunami, a NeXT logo as well as a subtle and elegant plum blossom. If you’ve wondered about the process, tools or just how laser etching looks – I put together some of the photos, links and files. Enjoy!
The $100 laptop is a project from MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte to bring a low-cost open source, windup-powered laptop to the world, targeted at children in developing nations. I really admire what they’re doing, this could be the most amazing thing ever. I am about to leave for a quick trip, but I wanted to post this up before the weekend – is it possible to cobble together “something” like that, using eBay and hunting around for stuff – while trying to stay under the $100 limit? Maybe – so, here it is so far, my version using an old Apple eMate. It’s not practical or scalable, or open source, but it’s going to be under $100 and best of all, it’s green too…
This is an old project using a BASIC Stamp, but I still wanted to get it up here “Identifying color is easy with the new Texas Advanced Optical Systems TCS230 frequency to color sensor. This is a high-sensitivity low-noise light-to-voltage optical converter that incorporates on board blue, green, and red optical filters. The sensor combines a photodiode and an amplifier on a single monolithic CMOS integrated circuit with a color filter over the photodiode. What’s really neat about this sensor is that it provides standard RGB color values with 90% accuracy.” Link.
I didn’t really plan using a $20,000 laser cutter on my 17″ Powerbook to etch a 19th-century engraving of a tarsier, a nocturnal mammal related to the lemur (also a book cover image, from O’Reilly), but it seemed like it had to be done. The results are stunning – photos and more…
Charles is looking for some help with a project, read the challenge and post up in the comments if you have ideas! “When you listen to music or speech in a noisy environment you have to constantly, continuously adjust the volume control: boost the gain when the sound level is low, reduce the gain when the level is high. For example trying to listen to a movie in an airplane, or to a program in a car. What’s needed is a gadget that automatically changes the gain of the amplifier, as a function of the average sound level, to reduce the dynamic range of the sound source — an audio compressor.”
Matthew writes “This is a page detailing how I made a Jack-o-Lantern lit by blinking mixtures of red, green, and blue LEDs in about 3 hours using about $5 worth of parts from a local electronics store and the power supply from my cordless phone. Includes pictures and a video.” Link.
Michael Tiemann here at OSCON has a challenge “Many car audio systems have a feature that increases the volume of the program to keep the signal level constant over the noise level. But with cars like the Prius, we can control the level of the noise based on the signal–a better approach. The first hack is to mod the Prius power management system so that in addition to battery level, acceleration, and speed, it takes GPS data into account…”
