Category: DIY

More on the geekly dressing tip, here with an Instrucable on incorporating EL wire into a skirt. Fire shirt! Rave on, dudette.

My posting of the WeaKnees upgrades announcement for DirecTV HR20 HD DVR boxes sparked a response on DBSTalk, the sat TV forum. Apparently, it’s not hard at all to upgrade with an external e-SATA drive, and high-capacity drives and drive enclosures are pretty cheap. This post summarizes the general thoughts on the thread fairly succinctly:

“With the Weaknees upgrade you 1) may lose the warranty, 2) you lose the original drive so who knows what you do if you ever need to return your HR20, 3) if you ever need to switch HR20s, or upgrade to D*’s next DVR (whenever that is), you’re back to square one. A Weaknees benefit is that you don’t need to assemble anything.

“With the e-SATA upgrade, you need to buy two parts (the Seagate DB35 750GB HD + MX-1 Enclosure), takes literally 5-10 minutes to install, plug it in, and re-boot. No issues with the warranty, can easily upgrade later to another HR20 or successor to the HR20, and can easily replace the drive if it ever fails (5-year warranty).

“While Weaknees has been great in the past, doesn’t seem compelling at this time for the HR20.”

My pal Brian Jepson is posting a lot of very interesting and useful info and hacks for the iPhone on Hackszine, like this one:

If you’re a heavy iTunes and iPhoto user, you will probably quickly overflow the limited storage in the iPhone. You could dedicate a day of curatorial work to sifting through your photos and music to pick the ones to put on your phone, but if you want a quick and dirty solution, try creating a Smart Playlist and Smart Album that favor recent music and photos.

Read the rest of this post.

We were talking about this project at… oh nevermind… just check out this awe-inspiring 4-bit computer built entirely out of K’Nex. Here’s the description from the site:

“The K’NEX calculator stands over 10 feet tall, and can perform 4 bit addition and subtraction operations in about 30 seconds. The slowest part of the operation is the user entering the balls. From there the balls trickle down, computing the result of the operation, and then sending that through a 4 bit decoder, which flips a flag that tells the user the answer. Since it is 4 bit, we can add and subtract numbers from 0 to 15.”

Read the Ball Theory page for a succinct and graphical description of how this system can be used to create the various logic gates needed in computing (and some of the design challenges involved). The videos explain a lot, too.

[Via Make]

One of the more interesting people I had the pleasure of meeting at Foo Camp was Jim Mason of The Shipyard, the brilliantly-mad Berkeley art and alternative energy space/community (which was recently forced to vacate their premises and is now looking for donations to re-emerge bigger and more bad-ass, outside of Berkeley. Help out!).

Anyhoo, at Camp, Jim was drumming up interest for The Mechabolic, a crazy-ass bio-fuel slug/digestive system sculpture thingy that he and his cohort plan to build at ’07 Burning Man. It’s “human anatomy meets hot rod fetishism,” er… or something like that. If you want to know more about “Team Metabolic” and their “burlesque of synthetic metabolism,” check out the project’s website.

BTW: The wonderful Neverwas Haul, featured in my recent Wired.com steampunk piece, was built at The Shipyard.

You know we’re fans of geek sartorial, the nerd “colors,” if you will, here at Street Tech Labs, so we’d be remiss if we didn’t link to this Instructable for stringing a bracelet with chunks o’ motherboard. Not “exactly” my style, but close. I might try something like this. I keep meaning to try my hand at some electronics parts jewelry.

Atmel’s AVR microcontrollers, both the tinyAVR and megaAVR classes, are growing in popularity among hobbyists, roboticists, gamers, and others using embedded computer control. Our pals at Solarbotics use the ATmega8L AVR in their BrainBoard Sumbot add-on kits. Lady Ada has also just released a cheap (US$18) kit for building a USB-powered programmer for AVR MCUs. With the Adafruit kit, all that’s missing is a board to house the chip so that you can plug the programmer in and send your code to it (one of the cool features of Ada’s kit is that it powers the chip over USB). That’s where a target board comes in, and that’s what this Evil Mad Scientist Labs how-to is all about: showing you how to build a quick n’ dirty target board for a couple of bucks. Nifty.

EMS Labs also has a review of the Adafruit USBtinyISP AVR Programmer kit here.

[Shown above is the Adafruit AVR Programmer and an EMS Labs target board.]

Street Tech pal and steam robot guru I-Wei Huang has thoughtfully documented the steps to his latest build, a steam-powered, radio-controlled turbine tank, and created an Instructable.

If you weren’t tempted to hack some steam-tech before, you likely will be after checking this out. That little Jensen turbine is sweet!

Thanks, I-Wei!

Without getting all verklempt and making Herr von Slatt too uncomfortable, I gotta tell ya that work like his new steampunk monitor (to go along with his RSS sounder and keyboard) is what makes me happy to come into work every morning (albeit just down the hall from my bedchambers). One of the many things I love about Jake’s work is the little surprise or two always contained within the projects, inspired little gems. This one has a number of them, perhaps most awesome of which are the “chime levers” he installed on the underside of the monitor frame to trigger the monitor controls underneath the monitor itself (see image below). ingenious. Looking at the base, you’d swear it was marble. It isn’t. It’s a *photo* of marble that Jake found in a Google search, printed out, and glued onto wood.

The whole project was inspired by some decorative gas lamp arms he bought from the “mad salvager” at Sequential Glass. They form nifty decorative elements on the bottom corners of the monitor frame.

As usual, Jake includes a video tutorial, this one on how to do mirror image transfers on templates. For this project, he used this technique to draw out some brass curly-q’s for the gold-painted aluminum angle stock he used for the frame.

Awesome job, Jake! Let’s see: you’ve done a keyboard, a monitor, an RSS telegraph sounder… Is that case mod I smell?

Longtime Street Tech contributor Mark Crane sent me a link to this amazing Instructable where a guy built a 3D displacement map scanner using little more than LEGO bricks, a Web cam, a Tupperware container, and milk! By photographing sequences of an object being progressively submerged in the milk, and then feeding them into a 3D program that supports displacement mapping, you can create a virtual 3D object from a real one. Ingenious.

Thanks, Craniac!