Category: DIY

Tech writer Kirk McElhearn has a decent run-through of fixes and get-by hacks for iPods with dead batteries, broken screens, and the like. The comments to the piece have some added suggestions, such as using the Rockbox.org open-source menu-speaking program on an iPod where the screen has given up the ghost.

You’ve likely heard about TV-B-Gone, the universal OFF button for television. While this thing is little more than a gag gift, and at US$25, a rather pricey one, it has gained something of a cult following among pranksters. Trying to listen to a singer in a club while drunks at the bar are hooting it up over a game on TV? TV-B-Gone! Wanna mess with the Blue Shirts in the TV dept at Best Buy? TV-B-Gone!

To extend the range of TV-B-Gone from between 20-50′ to some 90′, m_jake, the same DIY guy who did an Instructables for my Mousey the Junkbot, has created the Ultra TV-B-Gone, which has a 20-bulb array of ifrared LEDs and a 9v battery. M_jake also brought us the TV-B-Gone hat. This geek is a one-man TV terminator.

This crazy bugger scratch-built a Matrix Regenerator pod casemod worthy of a movie sci-fi special F/X shop. Not only is the mod impressive, but he has dozens of pics and shows the detailed steps and fab work in metal, plastic, clay, rubber molding and clear urethane casting. A nice and informative “how I did it.”

This is the same guy (Paul Capello) who did the Doom3 Mars City mod. If you never took a look at that, here’s a link. It’s even more insane than the Matrix mod. 15 months worth of work. As Paul sigs his postings: “Madness is just a cry for help.” I hear ya, brother.

[edit: removed links, as Google says they’re malware now. sorry!]

Philip Torrone of Make has a couple of geeky watch casemods on Flickr. The TicTac mod speaks for itself. The other watch is made from cheap digital watch innards, a juice bottle cap, and an Ikea velcro cable tie.

One of the guys at the first DC Dorkbot meeting, Tim Slagle, brought a glowing orb toy he’d gotten on eBay. It strobes through the color spectrum using RGB (Red, Green, Blue) LEDs. I didn’t even know there was such a component. They look like regular LEDs except they have a driver circuit built right into the LED package. All you have to do is hook up power and ground and they’ll run through their color sequence. There’s also a four-pin variety (pictured here), with one pin for each color and a common cathode. You can use these for three status indicator lights on the same lamp, or you can generate a range of colors using pulse width modulation. Nifty! This type does not have an on-board driver, you have to drive it with an external controller.

Here’s a link to Spark Fun’s RGB LED catalog page for the 4-pin type.
Here’s a page that explores the technical details of RGB LEDs.
Here’s an eBay seller of the two-pin type.
Here’s a little movie Thomas Edwards made of Tim Slagle’s RGB LED Orb.

Update: Tim emailed me with corrections to the above item. There are two types of RGB LEDs, 2-pin with an on-board driver, and 4-pin that require external control. Changes made.

The folks over at the DenGuru decided to get out of the family room for a little fresh air. Of course, they took their tools and a mini-ITX PC, a hard drive, an LCD touchscreen, a power supply, and some other misc. hardware with them and installed a computer in their car. Hey, you only need so much fresh air and all that harsh, direct overhead lighting. Read of their little trip outdoors here.

Sketching in Hardware was a conference that just concluded at the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan. The subject was “physical computing” and the ideas, methods, challenges and potential of these embedded systems. There’s a Flickr pool for the event. The pics aren’t that exciting, but the conference sounds like it was cool. Love the name.

Dave Zatz has a couple of cool and relatively easy hacks for the newly released TiVo Desktop app. The first one allows you to transcode programs you’ve already recorded (the Desktop is set up to only transcode new incoming content) and the second hack allows you to up the screen res for transcoded shows (set by TiVo Desktop to 320×240).

We’ve made the point here several times in the past that the “Helping Hand” (also called a “Third Hand”) is a crucial tool in doing successful electronics work. We recommend having at least two. On the wonderful, marvelous Instructables, a builder shows how easy it is to add your own ball-socketed, adjustable “fingers” to your Hand. The more fingers the merrier, we say.

In another Instructable, he shows a “why the hell didn’t *I* think of that?” way of tweaking the set-up of your Helping Hand unit to make it much more useful for small PCBs and other close-in work (hint: it involves ditching that magnifying “finger” that’s rarely used — at least my scratched up, crappy plastic one isn’t — I have an honest-to-goodness glass one on my second Hand).

Never ones to pass up suggestions for playing dress-up to the sartorially impaired among us, we bring you black tie and twisted pair, via these DIY geek chic cufflinks made from Ethernet jacks and wire. Nice, but do you have anything in a black boot, the clear plastic jacks are so… ’70s lucite.

[Via Boing Boing]