Bag of Beans

This is a handy site with instructions and animations for tying many different knots. Note that you need to enable Javascript for the animations to work properly.

• Link (via Cool Tools)

Check out these photo galleries of frighteningly bad home improvement projects.

• Gallery 1
• Gallery 2
• (via Boing Boing)

Engadget has put up part 1 of a how-to for building an HD projector.

Been eyeballing those sweet new high definition projectors? So have we. We’re not going to feel guilty for it either, we know what we like. But if your wallet is a little light from your last Engadget inspired shopping session you might dig our how-to latest project. In Today’s how-to, we’ll start taking a look at building your own HD projector… from an LCD Monitor. This isn’t one to be missed.

Building your own projector isn’t a new idea. Disassemble a desktop LCD display, put a really, really bright light behind it and add some optics and voila! you’ve got a projector. The real question: is it worth it? Since you might be a little leery of dropping several hundred dollars on parts and gutting a nice display because people you don’t know on an online forum said so, we’re going to do it for you.

• Link (via hack a day)

Inventgeek has a fascinating project that uses a webcam and a small radiation source from common household fire alarms to visualize radioactive decay. This could have applications as a source of entropy for a true random number generator.

I started this project with more of an idea of creating a system that would visualize Cherenkov radiation via webcam utilizing a Gamma radiation source and heavy water in some heavy lead shielding to produce the tell tale bursts of blue light. Perhaps hook it up to the LCD window kit system we did and display it on the windowed screen. When I decided to ramp up the project and also was experimenting with other types and sources of radiation for the project I stumbled across a myriad of new ideas for possible systems with some far reaching and profound results. While this write-up is just discussing in detail the implementation of this apparatus for ones personal amusement via screensaver, there are other far reaching possibilities for this system I will discuss later in the article.

• Link (via Slashdot)

Microsoft has released a robotics development environment, currently available for free download. It appears to be targeted for the Lego Mindstorms RCX, Lego Mindstorms NXT, and fishertechnik systems.

The Microsoft Robotics Studio is a Windows-based environment for academic, hobbyist and commercial developers to easily create robotics applications across a wide variety of hardware. Key features and benefits of the Microsoft Robotics Studio environment include: end-to-end Robotics Development Platform, lightweight services-oriented runtime, and a scalable and extensible platform.

• Link (via MAKE: Blog)

TechBlog has posted a Top 10 list of some pretty crazy contraptions.  Anyone need a USB Floppy Disk Striped RAID?

• Link (via Digg)

Instructables has a new howto on building a miniature trebuchet out of paperclips, for when you declare war on your coworkers.

• Link (via MAKE: Blog)
  

Ladyada has a new howto on building a USB device charger based on two AA batteries, instead of previous, similar devices based on 9V batteries.

Another problem with the 9V+7805 scheme is that a 7805 is a linear regulator. That means if you want 100mA at 5V (basically, USB power) then you’re taking 100mA at 9V and then losing the 4V*100mA = 400mW (.4W) difference as heat. As the battery wears down to 7V the heat loss goes down to (7-5V)*100mA=.2W but you’re still getting bad efficiency. At best the efficiency is 72% (5V/7V) and at worst its 55% (5V/9V) That means you’re losing about a third of the battery power to heat!

• Link to announcement
• MintyBoost page
• A copy of the tutorial has also been posted on Instructables.

This is quite an interesting article on building a pair of cheap infrared goggles and how they work.

At one point I started wondering just how much IR light a human eye could see. After all, if the infrared light was EXTREMELY BRIGHT (such as the IR of a sunny day,) human eyes might still detect it. And remember, if 30KHz ultrasonic sound is loud enough, you will hear it. Same basic idea. I got some of our black IR filter plastic and cut it into 2in. oblong disks to fit the eye-depressions in my own skull. I taped them onto my face with black electrical tape. Yes, I looked odd, but it worked! After I became accustomed to the darkness inside the filters, I could see through them. Going outside on a sunny day was stunning. The sky was almost black, while the trees and shrubs where all frosty pink. The grass looked like fluorescent red cherry Koolaid powder. Different colors of human skin were always the same light grey. People’s eyes looked very black, and certain dark clothing looked white. I was afraid that I might damage my eyes, since the IR sunlight was very bright, and my pupils were wide open. (After years of playing with these, I still haven’t hurt my eyes, so they’re PROBABLY somewhat safe to use.)

• Link (via Digg)

Lighthouse in a Tree has a nifty pinhole camara that you download as a PDF and put together yourself. They also have a flash tutorial on how to assemble the camera.

• Link (via Lifehacker)
• This site has another version of the camera, as well as a little bit of the history behind these paper cameras.

Grynx has a simple project to build a LED flashlight using an empty Tic Tac box.

A disposable torch with long life (I hope I don’t invent the wheel once more) I bought ‘tic-tac’ mint candy and found out that this package must be ideal for 3 AAA batteries to make a small torch (or lamp) with.
Yes the batteries fitted perfect - I soldered them in series and used a small micro switch from an old circuit-board together with an ultra bright white LED (25.000 mcd - 3,8 volt and 20 mA - 35 degrees) and a serial resistor of 27 ohm (to make it 3,8 Volt).

• Link (vai MAKE: Blog)

This is a nice and easy to make flash bouncer card. Sure beats the old index card and elastic band trick.

• Link (via MAKE: Blog)
• Also check out their article on making a Flash Mounted Homemade DIY Softbox

Article on building your own DIY studio lighting rig. A nice alternative to expensive lighting systems for amateur photographers.

A flexible lighting system is something that I have wanted to play with for a while, but like everything else in photography it seems to be a fairly expensive area to get into, at least when you consider the relative simplicity of a light-bulb.

Thankfully there are a number of cheap and widely-available or easily-made items that can provide most of the same functionality at a small fraction of the price. For under US$75, this article will show you how to put together a flexible and robust lighting system that is both useful and relatively easy on the hip pocket.

• Link (via Lifehacker)

Brad Isaac has a great little howto on binding your own books.

If you like ebooks but don’t like reading them on your computer screen, this How-to post is for you. I’ll show you a quick and dirty book binding technique you can use to turn your ebook into a real book with about 5 minutes worth of effort. In fact, this is so easy, you might end up self-publishing your own books on demand for profit. If that’s the case, you owe me a copy.

This process involves just a few basic steps, no sewing, or doing mini-binds (otherwise called signatures). The most time consuming part of this process is just waiting for glue to dry.

• Link (via Lifehacker)

Spark Fun Electronics has a put up a great howto on building a huge wall clock in their office. From MAKE: Blog:

Spark Fun Electronics writes - “Why? Well, why not? We had the new LED Light Bars burning a hole in our pocket, so we decided to build a clock. Not just any clock - but a very large 24″ tall, 12 foot wide, clock with GPS current time and accuracy down to 100ns. The clock turned into a huge undertaking. But at least we get to annoy Eric as the huge thing ticks over above his desk…”

• Link (via MAKE: Blog)

This is a short review of a thermoplastic you can easily sculpt for your own plastic parts.

For those who don’t know, Shapelock is a polymer (plastic) similar to polypropylene except that it has a very low temperature softening point. The idea is that you heat some water to around 160 degrees F and dump some of the pellets into the water to soften them to a moldable state. After molding, you then allow the plastic to cool and it once again takes-on its hard form. The label likens Shapelock to “modeling clay on steroids” and that’s a pretty good analogy.

• Link (via Digg)
• MAKE also has a videocast about this product here.

This page has some simple source files you can use to test various PICmicro controllers by making them blink a LED.

For non-embedded programmers the first thing to try on a new system or in a new programming language is to print out “hello world”. The equivalent for microcontrollers and other embedded systems is to blink a LED. When even the target circuit and the programmer are freshly put together it is wise to start even lower, with a blink-a-LED program written by someone else that is known to be working. Then when the LED does not blink (which is likely) there is one thing less to doubt about. On this page you will find 1 and 2 Hz blink-a-LED (and some other) test programs for various targets chips and circuits.

• Link (via MAKE: Blog)

For all the coffee-lovers, here’s a way to roast your own beans.

In today’s How-To we’ll cover converting a popcorn popper… into a home coffee roasting machine. If you love coffee like we do (and we have a feeling ya do), try upgrading your beans by roasting your own. Roasted coffee can go stale within a week or two, which is exactly why freshness is of the utmost importance when it comes to your brew. Plus, high quality green coffee beans are generally half the price of roasted, and can be easily stored throughout the year.

• Link

This is a brilliant idea. Someone figured out that the Creative Zen Micro fits perfectly inside an Altoids mint tin. Just drill a hole for the headphone jack and you’re set! If you like, you can also cut holes for the power switch and usb connectors. Check out my pictures on flickr.

• Thread on Head-fi.org where the idea originated
  

Nathan True has hacked together a wireless music player using a Netgear WGT634U wireless router. It might be hard to locate the Netgear router since it has been discontinued, but still a nice hack.

The Mission

When I began this project, I knew I could not settle for anything less than:

• A small, low-power networked music player, which
• Runs Linux, and
• Can connect either wirelessly or wiredly, that
• Supports MP3, OGG, and FLAC at a minimum, and
• Accepts commands remotely from a PC or PDA, in addition to
• Displaying song info such as Artist/Title on a display local to the device.