According to his blog, Ben Heck has just completed a revision 2 version of his Commodore 64 laptop. The updated model includes the newer version of the 1541 Ultimate SD card ‘disk drive’ and USB and ethernet ports that are now open and easily accessible on the front of the laptop. The best part though is that the laptop will actually be auctioned off for charity (the American Cancer Society he believes) and Ben promises to post more details about how you can maybe make this your own as they become available.
We covered Ben Lewry’s LCD guitar back in 2007 when it was a prototype, but here at Maker Faire we got to check out the latest version in person. The “LCDetar” took him 3 months to build at a cost of about $5000; it comes with a Wiimote built into the headstock that communicates with the visualizer built into the body of the guitar so that you can alter the patterns with a thrash or two:
Each guitar is a custom job, but you can contact Ben Lewry at Visionary Instruments for more info.
Jonathan Oxer’s RX-8 is equipped with a 3G connection running on a tiny little Ubuntu Linux system that’s always on. Besides turning the car into a 24×7 internet hotspot, it gives Jon the ability to access the car’s systems from anywhere in the world, and using an iPod touch he can turn the car on and off, lock and unlock it, and even pop the trunk. The browser based interface also gives Jon the ability to monitor engine telemetry, and even shows the position of the car on Google Maps.
As if that wasn’t enough, the car has an RFID reader mounted in the back right window, so when Jon walks up to the car, it reads an RFID tag implanted in his arm and then unlocks the door and starts the engine. This means that he doesn’t have to worry about someone stealing his keys, but he does have to worry about someone stealing his arm, which is just the sort of thing that keeps me up at night.
There’s no shortage of noveltyalarm clocks designed to force you out of bed in the morning, but I suspect if you were to build one yourself, you’d be less inclined to smash it to pieces when it’s time to wake up. So head on over to Instructables where you’ll find a tutorial by ‘dylan2106′ that cleverly adds a key lock to your alarm, forcing you to get out of bed and find where you blindly threw the key the night before, in order to turn it off.
As an added safety mechanism, the modified alarm clock also uses the 9V backup battery to activate and power a loud buzzer in the event the user tries to foil the alarm by unplugging it from the wall. As is usually the case you’ll need to know a bit about wiring, soldering and electronics to pull off the hack, and in the end it seems like an awful lot of work when you could simply wake up on time by just going to bed slightly earlier. But where’s the fun in that?
Most research and development facilities start from the ground up when it comes to designing new technology, but engineers at General Electric’s Global Research development arm have done just the opposite. They transformed one of the company’s existing home security motion sensors into a device that’s smart enough to classify different types of motion, even to the point of wirelessly monitoring a person’s breathing and heart rate.
The upgrades to the motion detector mostly came in the form of sophisticated processing algorithms that allow the sensor’s ‘brain’ to better process a person’s movement. Possible applications for the improved motion sensors include monitoring patients or the elderly at home as well as neonatal infant health monitoring since premature babies often have skin that’s too fragile to physically attach sensors to.
Like any technophile, I was quite excited for the DTV transition to finally hit the U.S. I mean free digital and HD signals over the air? What downside could there possibly be? I was on cloud nine, until I realized that my beloved Sony Watchman, the first gadget I ever skimped and saved for, would become useless once the analog broadcasts stopped transmitting.
And unfortunately, all of the DTV converter boxes currently on the market are AC powered, which totally negates the ‘portable’ aspect of a portable TV. But over on Instructables, Kipkay has posted a tutorial on how to hack one of those converter boxes to run on battery power. Besides making your portable TV portable again, the hack is also useful for camping or in the event of emergencies when there’s no power and you have to rely on a portable set. Now if I could just find a way to splice the signal from a DTV converter box into my Watchman, I’d be all set.
And if you’re curious, after the jump I’ve included a few more glamor shots of my Watchman that I had sitting on my drive.
And speaking of calculators, what better way is there to take advantage of that powerful graphing calculator you bought for university than by installing Bill Nagel’s custom Super Mario game. It’s not a port of any of the actual Super Mario games from Nintendo, but a recreation that includes 13 unique enemies, 64 unique background tiles, fast scrolling, power-ups like a growth mushroom and fire flowers and even a “somewhat-challenging” boss.
The game can be downloaded from ticalc.org, and if you need instructions on how to install it on your own calculator head on over to Brown-Eyed Albino’s Blog for a brief write-up and a link to a YouTube video.
Remember the Nerf Vulcan? Of course you do. It’s the belt-fed, fully automatic chain gun that just happens to fire squishy little Nerf darts instead of something more, uh, significant. And it’s only $40, which means that you can definitely afford one. The only downside is the somewhat lackluster 3 darts per second performance. Not so hot.
Some guys from ManaPotions.com were unimpressed, and decided to perform a little unauthorized modification. With the addition of a 9.6 volt power source, they managed to bump the rate of fire up to something comparable to an actualM60 machine gun, at 500 (!) darts per minute. They also added an LCD shot counter and gave it a sweet paint job. The cost of the modifications (which are not at all complicated) was about $80, although you’re highly likely to melt the motor and gears of your Vulcan if you do it. Totally worth it, obviously.
Over on Ars Technica’s Infinite Loop, Erica Sadun has a post about developer Steven Troughton-Smith who updated his port of Doom to use the iPhone’s undocumented TV-out functionality. As you can see in the photo, the iPhone itself is then used as a touch-based controller for the game, with large, easy to locate buttons. Very cool. And as for why he decided to hook it up to a monochrome Apple II monitor for this photo; “this is what passes for ‘fun’ around me.” Fair enough.
At this point Steven has no plans for adding the TV-out feature to his public build of Doom, but Erica has provided the necessary steps for you to do it yourself since the Doom source is available as an open source Google Code repository. You just need to be a registered iPhone developer, and of course know how to program.
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