Not the easiest thing to install, but the results are fantastic. Read more about the Car PC Build here.

“What’s a CarPC? Simply put, it’s a PC that goes into your car. This can be easily and clumsily done with a laptop and a stereo that has a line-in adapter, but for a more permanent and elegant solution, you need to do some tweaking. Luckily, that’s one of the areas of technology that the Apps Lab guys here at Corsair happen to love.

Not only that, we’re going to be shoving all this high tech equipment into a car you might see just about anywhere, a 1999 Honda Passport. ”

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Other than size, the likeness of this Unidyne Mic Case Mod is outstanding.

“The Unidyne PC is my tribute to the Shure Model 55 Unidyne microphone, also known as “The Elvis Mic.”

The body of the computer is made of basswood finished with an industrial aluminum paint. The base is a full-size microphone stand that has been modified to be a desktop unit.

The computer is a VIA M10000 motherboard with a 1GHz Nehemiah-core CPU. It has 512MB of Crucial SDRAM memory and a 40GB IBM 2.5″ hard drive. These components are combined with a modified PCI slot exhaust fan and formed into a cartridge-styled unit that is separate and independent from the case.

The cables are bound into a single unit to simulate a microphone cable.

The computer took approximately six weeks to complete. It was designed and built without plans or access to an actual microphone. ”

Via: TechEBlog

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Mac Cody has been playing with digital compass electronics, read about his new project.

“I wanted to optimize the use of four data bits of an I/O port. That implied that I wanted to have sixteen points of precision on my digital compass. If I wanted to read in the data serially, even higher precision could potentially be obtained. I toyed with one digital compass design that uses a PIC processor, two of LED-optotransistors pairs placed in quadrature, and a compass with an encoder disk with varied tone shading to represent orientation. The PIC processor would implement two successive approximation analog-to-digital converters to measure the position of the encoder disk. I decided that this was far too much work to get only sixteen unique compass positions.”

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If you have a bit of time and some change in your pocket why not make a cool ring for yourself. I always thought it was illegal to do this type of thing, but it seems that if you don’t intend to use the coin as currency every again it is not illegal.

“First you need a piece of steel to use as a base for the coin to set on. Take the coin and stand it on edge. Tap the reeded edge with a spoon or a small machinist hammer while continually rotating the coin, I would recommend using the spoon first until you get the hang of how the silver feels when it folds. Be patient and don’t rush it, it takes a while. ”

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With the warm days of summer here, this Motorized Pool Lounger looks like a great way to pass a day.

“Don’t Just Float—Drive!

The Motorized Pool Lounger may be the most advanced pool lounger in the world—and it’s definitely the most fun! Two quiet but powerful motors will propel you around your pool in comfort and style, with easy-to-use joysticks that control two independent propellers.

Why just float when you can drive?

* Large, comfortable armrests
* Independent power and directional control
* Built-in cup holder
* Supports up to 250 pounds!
* Two separate motor/propeller subassemblies
* Sturdy 0.35 mm PVC construction
* Requires 12 x 1.5 volt D-Cell batteries (not included)”

Via: PopularScience

Sean Harrison has built a very cool hard drive project. Similar to the Hard Drive Oscilloscope but uses two hard drive voice coils instead of just one. This allows the unit to draw an X/Y image without needing to control one axis by hand.

“Right, well I had been looking around the net and found the Hard Drive Laser Oscilloscope over at Hacked Gadgets and thought about trying to make one using two hard drives to give horizontal and vertical beams. So rather than an oscilloscope it would give me some funky visuals fx.

Similar to the Hard Drive Laser Oscilloscope, But this project uses two hard drives, to project the laser in both the X and Y Axis, Making Funky Laser FX Which move to you music collection. (Pictures and Videos After Link) All You need is a couple of dead hard drives, A Laser Pen few bits of wire, 2 bits of mirror and loads of hot glue!”

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This is a good use of a sample PIC chip and a handful of extra components. Check out the site for a complete schematic and construction details.

“On this page i will explain how i created my own colour changing lamp with red, green and blue leds that fades between all colours of the rainbow. It really comes out well at night when other light are dimmed. In daylight conditions the colors aren’t noticed well. Although it’s low budget i must say the result is nice. Here are some photo’s of my lamp in action. Click on any foto to see it in a bigger size.

So if it’s low budget, what did you use? Well, mainly free stuff lying around. For the casing i used a plastic pyramid of ferrero rocher chocolates. I also used a microchip pic16f628 microprocessor i got from a free sample. Then i used some resistors and transistors i soldered out from old electronics. The LEDS were the most expensive. I used extra bright ones (red: 3000 mcd, green: 4000 mcd, blue:5000 mcd, all with a 25 degrees opening). I also purchased a battery holder for 4 AAA batteries which power this lamp for 10 hours non stop light effects.”

Via: Make

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