Retro Computing — And One Mouse to Rule Them All
Consolidating your computer peripherals.
Technology
Design and build your own miniature scale aircraft for indoor flying
Excellent site for on designing and building your own miniature scale aircraft for indoor flying. This site is mainly aimed at people new to this kind of aeromodelling and those who want to design and build their own machines. Includes plans to help you get started, and you can look at the pages on indoor planes and park flyers to find something similar to what you want to build. This will give you an idea of weight, motors, rubber sizes, control systems etc based on something that works and should save you some development headaches. Thanks Rick! Link.
HOW TO – Make a radio controlled voice box
This guide will show you how to use a PicoSwitch in combination with a simple voice recorder to make a radio controlled voice/sound effect box. You can then mount this box into a radio controlled car, plane, boat, robot etc. and have fun triggering sounds at just the right moments. All you need to do is to take wires from the ‘play’ switch of a voice recorder, and connect them to a PicoSwitch. Link.
HOW TO – Make a (real) Pumpkin PC
Here’s a photo diary explaining how a group of Makers made a PC using a real pumpkin as the case. The Pumpkin PC uses a Latitude D410 motherboard and red flashing fans for eyes. It would be cool in version 2 to have a LCD screen that pull Flickr photos with tagged Jack-o-lantern photos. [via] Link.
Jewelry made from electronic parts
Stunning collection of jewelry made from electronic parts. Capacitor necklaces, diode earrings, Cat5 bracelets – my fav “1.1MΩ Purple Resistor Necklace: Necklace created from 32 1.1MΩ resistors, their leads wrapped four times around a central ring to create this pattern, with additional resistors accenting the edges.” [via] Link.
HOW TO – get audio output on RS-232 (serial port)
Here’s a really neat project that plays audio out of a PC serial port running Linux. It works by resampling audio to the baudrate of the serial port. Some comments on the site point out that this is a lot like the old days of TRS-80s, TI-85’s and Sinclair ZX’s when you wanted to get audio out of them. [via] Link.
Dell SC420 PCI-Express Modification
Dell included a 16X PCI-E slot with the Dell SC420. Oddly only enough pins for an 8X card are present, and they placed 2 dividers preventing the use of a 16X card even though it’s a 16X slot. Knocking out those two dividers and running a 16x card at 8x is the plan. With the minimal effects of 8X vs. 16X, this modification was a go! [via] Link.
