Category: DIY

Seems like we stumbled over some converging geek cultural vectors with our Thumbnail Guide to Soldering. It came out at the same time that Bre Pettis was working on MAKE’s solder how-to netcast. They made our Guide into a PDF to travel with the netcast and we’re still getting crazy links o’ love on the Web version. And now, Instructables has declared January “Learn to Solder Month.” They have a page on their site with soldering resources, links to beginner solder projects, and if you post an Instructable geared towards beginner solderers this month, they’ll send you an Instructables patch you can sew onto your Star Fleet uniform, Robot Wars team jumpsuit, or other geekly attire of choice.

But the important thing is to fire up that iron and start polluting the upper and lower atmospheres in earnest. And if you have any questions related to soldering, don’t be afraid to ask.

BTW: I’m working on our next Thumbnail Guide now. It’ll be on Breadboarding. Stay tuned…

I know plenty of PC users who have ventured as far inside the entrails of their machines as installing extra RAM, a new DVD drive, and maybe a graphics card, but who wouldn’t think of venturing further, to say, replace a motherboard or a fried power supply. These and other seemingly gnarly hardware upgrades are not that much more challenging, if you’re halfway sober when you’re doing it and you carefully follow decent instructions. Lifehacker’s Rick Broida offers such instruction for replacing a power supply in today’s Alpha Geek column.

He’s got some good tips in there, like taking “before” pics of the existing installation to make sure you hook everything up properly with the new power unit. Such uses for digital cameras can’t be stressed enough. We all have the damn things on our phones, on our belts, but rarely think to use them as a memory jogger/reference keeper (at least I don’t).

Bre Pettis of MAKE Media has put together a nice video/PDF package on soldering. The video features Joe Grand running down the basics of soldering/desoldering, even showing how to use Chip Quik, the desoldering kit for suface mounted components. They’ve teamed this video with a PDF version of my Street Tech Thumbnail Guide to Soldering.

Between these two pieces, there really is no excuse to not learn soldering. If you do decide to learn as a result of these and have any questions, feel free to post them here and we’ll try and help you out.

Just the other day, I was in the shower (oops, sorry, that’s a mental image you didn’t need) thinking about revamping my bricks and mortar library. I started wondering where my CueCat was — that ill-fated magazine barcode scanner from years back that mags like Wired were giving away — and if anyone had library scanning software for modern computers (XP and OS X). Well, here’s my answer, a project called LibraryThing. And if I can’t find my ‘Cat, they even sell ’em for US$15.

[Via Make]

This translated Japanese page with video shows you how to overclock a DS to run at 1.7x speed. It’s a switchable overclock, so you can kick in the afterburners as needed. You can see from the video that the juiced up clocktime is very noticeable. The overclock looks fairly easy, just two solder points on the mobo and adding a crystal and a switch.

[Via hackAday]

The 23rd Chaos Communication Congress, the well-known annual hackercon, took place in Berlin at the end of last month. Regine at We Make Money Not Art did an awesome job of covering the con. I really enjoyed peeking in on the con through her eyes. You can see a wrap-up of her coverage here. The Wiki for the con, which also has lots of great info, like papers presented by attendees, can be found here.

I’ve posted the Street Tech Thumbnail Guide to Soldering, the first in a series of such ST Thumbnail Guides. This one runs through the tools you need for soldering, the techniques required to do it well, and the common pitfalls that can frustrate the newbie. The piece includes awesome illustrations by Mark Frauenfelder (taken from my Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Building Robots).

Got a spare movie theater handy? Get a Wii for Christmas? If so, with a little hardware hacking, to bodge together a wireless sensor bar, you can play games on the BIG screen. Jon Peck and his pals were able to play Wii Sports bowling on a 344″ theater screen after the moviegoers had left (a friend is the theater’s manager). Looks like fun.

[Via Kotaku]

Lady Ada has posted detailed docs and pics of her Wave Bubble Portable RF Jammer. Like everything else this kick ass lady hacker does, this project is, well, kick ass!

This pics shows two versions, an early one with external rubber duckies (left) which has an effective range of 20′. and the final v1.0 model, with internal antenna. that hides inside of a ciggie pack (and offers less reach as a trade-off). Output power is .1W (high bands) and .3W (low bands). A rechargeable, internal Li-on batt offers up to four hours of ops, depending on number of bands jammed.

The WaveBubble is self-tuning and can jam many frequencies at the same time. A USB port allows you to plug the Wave Bubble into a PC to program new RF bands to jam.

Limor does her typical exemplary job of offering detailed docs, photos, parts lists, and even downloadable CAD, PCB (Gerber files), and schematics. But sadly, this is not a beginner or even intermediate project, as there is a lot of tiny surface mount components here. And no, she won’t make and sell you one and will not be offering a kit, as cellphone and other RF jamming is generally frowned upon by the FCC.

New Street Tech pal Jake von Slatt, whom I profile in an upcoming issue of MAKE, was inspired by Mark Frauenfelder’s limited-edition Gremlin Moleskines. Using the 19th century etching process he’s been experimenting with over at the Steampunk Workshop, Jake created this stunning series of brass-covered journals. He details the process in this tutorial.