Category: DIY

So, what DO you do when your mobile phone reception perpetually sucks, especially in a fixed location, LIKE MY HOUSE? Well, this guy stopped whinin’ about it, and built himself an ingenius little bi-quad antenna which uses a set of Helping Hands as its antenna mount. Using this homemade rig, the builder was able to get a usable signal where NO signal had existed before. Gotta love that.

Lloyd Case over at Extreme Tech has some words of wisdom for roll-your-own PC builders in FUBAR: Ten DIY Mistakes. He claims to have built several thousand systems, so he’s probably encountered every glitch imaginable.

The first question that springs to mind is: Why? But when it comes to geekly hardware hacking, we know the answer: Because other geeks are going to link to it like crazy, and the wackier the hack, the more the link-love. This Finnish dude put a Nokia phone LCD screen inside of a Logitech mouse. No, really.

[Via hackAday]

We’ve covered Third Hand hacks in the past. This one is especially cool ’cause it allows for up to four “arms” on the unit and you can swap out different types of fingers. The builder used Loc-Line components. While it may look like a kid’s building set, Loc-Line is a snap-together systems of tubes (yes, it’s a series of tubes) for delivering cutting fluid on machine tools. But as you can see from this Flickr set, it makes a bitchin’ solder helper rig, too!

[Via Make]

Mark Frauenfelder has an item on his Mad Professor blog about using ink refill kits with printer carts (something I’ve always thought about doing, but never gotten around to).

In the piece, he points out a “hack” I was unaware of. As you may know, many modern printer cartridges have ID chips in them. When the cart is read as empty by the printer, you can’t refill that cart and use it again (’cause the printer has a stored record of that cart being kaput). But, the printer (at least Mark’s HP — your printer’s mileage may vary) can only remember two carts at a time. So, if you keep a couple of dead ink cartridges around and insert those, in succession, when you insert your newly refilled cartridge, the printer will think it’s new. Cool. I’ll have to try this on my Epson.

LinuxDevCenter has a nice intro piece on hacking a Nokia 770 with Linux. As you may know, the Nokia 770 is that Internet tablet thing that Nokia put out that’s kinda too small to be a thoroughly useful tablet PC and it isn’t a phone. This piece discusses the uses and abuses of the 770 and shows some entry-level hacks.

The 770 is showing up increasingly on eBay. If I could get one of these for a few hundred bucks, I’d love to have email and Web, always within reach, no matter where I room in the house and yard.

C’mon, you know you’ve thought about it — no, not what you’d do if Natalie Portman actually answered your fanboy emails — building a Wi-Fi antenna from one of those in-pot steamer/strainers (a Hollywood favorite when depicting junk-built robots and various McGuyver hacks). A builder on Instructables has done just that, creating a signal booster for a thumb-drive-type USB Wi-Fi Adaptor. Making such a uni-directional booster is actually very easy, and at least according to the builder, significantly boosts signal strength.

We’re always on the lookout for fun and relatively easy electronics kits to recommend to those learning how to solder. This LED Shaking Dice kit (US$14.99) being sold at Think Geek looks like it fits the bill. And it meets one of our other criteria: it’s cheap! When you’re done with the build, you have a cool-looking random number generator that’s triggered when you shake it. It flashes away through its random number sequence, finally displaying a number of lit LEDs like the dots on an analog die.

[Via OhGizmo!]

If you’re a fan of creative electronics and mint tins and other cans used as project boxes, you’ve gotta take a gander at this Korean fella’s gallery of headphone amps and other DIY projects. Really cool and creative stuff. Builders will especially want to check out some of his neat and tiddy freeform circuits and some of his homemade tools and diagnostic and helper circuits. Here’s one more nifty pic from the site, a set of speakers housed in water jugs.

Jeff Duntemann has a really nice how-to on building a Wi-Fi waveguide antenna from a “Tetra Brik” type container (the kind of foil-lined packaging that Swanson Chicken Broth and Kitchen Basics Beef Stock comes in). I like the first part of this intro:

A lot more has been said than written about the legendary Pringle’s Can Wi-Fi antenna, and a lot more people have talked glowingly about them without ever actually using one. Look closely, and you’ll see that you have to add various things to it to make it work even so-so. Unless you have a can with a foil lining (not all Pringle’s cans that I’ve seen do) and unless you can make good electrical contact to that foil lining (not a slam-dunk, trust me!) the can won’t act as a waveguide antenna and thus won’t throw your signal very far or bring in anything from a distance… Don’t obsess on the Pringle’s solution. There’s an easier kitchen-trash antenna to be had: The Tetra Brik Soup Box.

[Via Make]