RFID Toys looks excellent! And it’s written by MAKE pal Amal Graafstra – “The book contains step by step guides to building various RFID based projects, and stresses the concepts involved as well as the steps themselves. RFID technologies covered include passive, low frequency 125KHz tags and readers, passive high frequency 13.56MHz, up to active, UHF 900Mhz tags and readers.” Thanks Matt! Link.
Dennis on the Amiga forums is building a mini Amiga. He writes – “I bought a Spartan-3 FGPA development board, learned Verilog (after finding out that VHDL was not my cup of tea) and started working on Minimig. Minimig stands for (very originally ) mini Amiga. My aim with Minimig is to built a complete OCS A500 (with some extra grunt and features like 4Mbyte ram and fast 68000 processor) on a circuit board about the size of a floppy drive. Loading of programs will be done by means of a MMC flash card, which holds the .ADF images of the floppies like a sort of hardware UAE!” [via] Link.
MAKE pal Zapwizard sent word that his wooden iPod would be at the FastMac booth at Macworld where they showcased a lot of Macmods – here they are, great hacks! – A cursed wooden Mac case, a Madmax style Powerbook, this thing is awesome (here’s the story of it too), a solar station for charging batteries, an iTablet (Tablet version of a Mac made from an iBook), and the wooden iPod. UPDATE: Make sure to check out MacMod, they’re the folks who put the hacks together!
That was quick: here’s a new Intel iMac dissection, looks moddable too – “One can notice that the processor is not soldered to the motherboard, but via a socket. So, it will be potentially possible to change it in the future, if Apple does not prevent such modifications by some hardware or software trick.” [via] The site is down, but here are other places – Mirror 1, Mirror 2 and Mirror 3.
TheDude06 writes “I finally completed my wireless guitar hero controller mod! With so much space available in the guitar, i knew it was possible. id just never got around to finally doing it. Long story short, i had to completely dismantle the guts of the guitar to do this. its not possible to do this mod without soldering or removing parts from the guitar hero board…. at least, not the way i dd it. Since i wasnt able to find a box that could turn any controller into a wireless controller locally, i figured id take a stab with these…” Link. The project is in our new MAKE forums. If you haven’t checked, hit’em and join–they’re on fire! (In a good way.)
Flickr member Filmosity’s modded a CVS disposable video camera to include a built-in USB cable for easy transfer of video – “…Side view of the CVS One time use Camcorder, hacked with a USB Cable. The cable now has some velcro that keeps it flush to the side of the cam. Still a few more mods I’m going to make to the cam, including changing the logos that show up when you turn the cam on and off.” Link. More CVS camera hacking here.
Tom made a pretty spiffy Ubuntu (Linux) home media center. He writes – “Like a lot of people nowadays, I have a growing collection of digital media. My digital media is stored on a home Linux server. Most of the digital media players available today do not support protocols to connect to a Linux server, which make them unsuitable for my use. I realized the best way to connect my digital media library with my home theatre was to build my own Linux home media center (LHMC)…” [via] Link.
