Posted May 4th 2008 10:42PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: home entertainment hacks
A while back, [Phil]
got ticked off and started working on linux support for the Logitech Harmony remotes for quite a while. Having owned one of these sweet remotes, I can honestly say that yes, they rock, and yes, the driver software can be pretty freakin' annoying. If you've got a Harmony remote and would like an alternative to the usual fare, check out
[Phil]'s project.
Posted Apr 21st 2008 8:37PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: home entertainment hacks, peripherals hacks, xbox hacks
[CyberPyrot] and [l0rdnic0] released their
spitfire mod on acidmods for XBox 360 controllers. It involves some fine wiring, but a relatively low parts count. The heart of the mod is a PIC16F84A, a crystal for the clock and a few passive parts. It took me a little while to find it, but the code for the pic hiding under the parts list. For a lengthy demo of the mod in action, you can check out this
video.
Posted Apr 17th 2008 9:45PM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: home entertainment hacks
[bunnie] just happened to be at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose on exactly the right day to witness the live teardown of a Sony XEL-1 OLED TV. The XEL-1 is Sony's flagship OLED panel that's only 3mm thick... and $2500 for just an 11-inch screen. [bunnie] was able to take
quite a few shots of the components as they were passed around. He pointed out a few interesting bits about the construction. There seems to be quite a bit of thermal material on the display to prevent "avalanche thermal failures" (which I'm guessing doesn't look as cool as it sounds). OLED displays are completely transparent and their legendary contrast ratio is just a result of the dark backing material. The mainboard seems to be a bit of overkill for this TV and [bunnie] concludes that it's just the standard image engine architecture from Sony's Bravia line put into a smaller package.
Posted Apr 10th 2008 11:59PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: home entertainment hacks, pcs hacks, peripherals hacks
[rustlabs]
put together an interesting looking gaming gun for FPS games. He wrote up his build and how to use a webcam to provide gun tracking for games like Half Life 2. He gutted a keyboard to provide the button interface, and infrared LEDs on the gun body are tracked by the cam. Surprisingly, no USB game pads were sacrificed in the build, just a USB keyboard and mouse.
Posted Mar 28th 2008 4:56PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: home entertainment hacks, misc hacks
[qDot]'s been
spending alot of time with the
Novint Falcon haptic controller. He's put together a 'brain dump' of everything he know about the device - and some notes on his efforts to put together his own software library for the thing. I'm definitely interested in the parallel robotics platform that it appears to be based on.
Posted Mar 27th 2008 11:01AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: home entertainment hacks
[Daniel] sent in
his Nixie tube VU meter. It uses 14 Russian IN-13 Nixie bar-graph tubes. He built a custom circuit to amplify, filter, smooth and feed a voltage divider to assign signal levels to segments and finally some high voltage transistors to drive the tubes. The circuit looks pretty big, but it's repeated for each tube - so he worked hard to keep the cost down as much as possible. Now this just needs to live on the front of a massive tube amplifier.
Posted Mar 20th 2008 10:33PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: home entertainment hacks
[Shadow] sent in
this handy idea. For many, it's sort of a captain obvious hack, but I'm hoping that this might keep a few of these things out of the trash. He needed to send video around the house from a media PC, and happened to have an old XBox RF modulator sitting around. He popped it apart and located the audio and composite video inputs. To get the signal to the rest of the house, he plans on installing a distribution amplifier that'll amplify and split the signal to each TV set.
Posted Mar 14th 2008 6:00PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: home entertainment hacks, laser hacks
If you're serious about your headphone amps, you probably already know about the
M3 headphone amplifier. Instead of going for the extra tiny, they're going the 'screw the size, it's all about the sound' route. Thsi thing needs a 24v .5amp power supply. Boards are available, and the discussion has gotten so long on headwize that they exceeded the
maximum thread length.
I got busy with the laser last night and came up with
something new: a custom etched track pad. It still works, with a bit of added texture where I introduced it to the warm glow of the laser. Hit the link for pics and a walk through.
Posted Feb 9th 2008 11:20AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: home entertainment hacks, misc hacks, playstation hacks
[Joel] sent in
his efforts to build an inexpensive 360 degree head tracking display. He's using a Playstation six axis controller as the key to his helmet tracking system. The demo is short and to the point. He's using the usual
Glovepie driver to provide the software interface and what looks like off the shelf hardware on the helmet.
What really grabs my attention is the low cost of getting into VR now. Assuming that you own a computer, you can build your own VR setup for the cost of a Playstation controller and a cheap heads up display. (Remember
these?)
Posted Jan 6th 2008 11:04PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: home entertainment hacks, portable video hacks
I've been trying to find an excuse to pick up one of the HD Aiptek cams for a while now. [windowlikker]
posted his simple pre-amp + external audio input mod for his Aiptek AHD videocam. Unfortunately, the mod is limited to mono input unless there's an un-used stereo input on the encoder board.
Posted Jan 4th 2008 11:01PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: home entertainment hacks
I'm not usually into products, but I like this one. Remember
this diy SDI DVD video out mod which lets you send high quality digital video over coax? Thanks to
Pixel Magic, you can mod
a variety of DVD players to add SDI thanks to the kit they're offering. At a glance, bt.656 and bt.601 appear pretty similar, but the eval kit from the original only claims to be compatible with bt.601 while the Pixel Magic version is for bt.656.
Posted Dec 27th 2007 10:38PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: home entertainment hacks
[Dane]
built this excellent home theater pre-amplifier. He used [Mark Hennesy]'s
pre-amp design to start with, and added selectable XLR, RCA, SPDIF and even USB audio inputs. Discrete inputs from his DVD player provide surround input, and an analog matrix creates 7.1 surround from the 5.1 input. The design is very elegant, and even uses a VFD display that appears blue with some filters. I usually just buy my HT gear, but projects like this make me seriously consider re-building my entire HT from scratch.
Posted Dec 15th 2007 11:28PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: home entertainment hacks
[Jason] sent in
his low-tech, but interesting hack to allow the use of a DDR pad with his Gameboy advance to play PacMan. He took a $15 DDR pad, gutted it and wired directly to each of the foil pads that he wanted to use as buttons. For his project, he simply wired each pad directly to the DPad buttons on his Gameboy. It's really a pre-manufactured version of [fbz] zone switches that she built for her
backpack strap wifi detector.
By the way, [matt] over at Instructables wanted me to let you guys know that they're
giving away a $15k Versalaser.
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