Precisewitem from the Hacked Gadgets Forum has put together a nice tutorial on how to perform an LED mod to your Xbox 360 Controller.

“SUPPLIES BASICS
- Soldering Iron – 15W Can be purchased as a kit from rat shack
- 30 AWG Wire Strippers – Not necessary but will help out a lot
- Resin Core Solder – Comes in kit if you get it at rat shack
- 1/16 -> 1/8 shrinkwrap and shrinkable tape – Necessary
- LEDs – All same color or specifications. Up to 3V Forward voltage
- Resistor – Calculated based upon LEDs. Lookup Resistor Calculator
- Sponge – Not necessary but helpful
- T8 Torx Skrewdriver – sold with controller case
- 30 AWG hookup wire – 28 or 30 AWG is a must as the wire has to navigate the inside of the controller case. ”

Congratulation to Daniel D., the winner last week.

There will be two winners this week. The first prize this week will be useful to anyone who needs to do presentations. It has a laser pointer, LED light, ball point pen and extendable pointing rod. Chris Rybitski has also donated one of his cool tech keychains which he will send to the second winner. Thanks Chris!

This contest will run for this weekend only (June 30 – July 1, 2007) . Ending time is based on central standard time. To enter, identify the item pictured above and give an example of what can be done with it. Please do not give the answer in the comments.

Send an email to contest @ hackedgadgets.com with “Name the Thing Contest” as the subject, and the message body consisting of:
* The name of the item in the above picture
* An example of what the item pictured above can be used for

The winner will be chosen at random from all the correct entries.

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Added July 3, 2007

Thanks to all who entered.
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Below are pictures of the prizes, more pictures on page 2.

Diodes can be used for temperature sensing. Nick Chernyy used this principle to make a Diode based Fan Controller for his Shuttle PC.

“Figuring that I should just go build a more substantial fan controller myself, I promptly went to the lab to look for a thermistor. Unable to find one, I settled for the next best thing: a diode. After building the circuit, I tested the output with a DMM and applied various amounts of heat using a hot air gun. For the final install, I simply stuck the diode inside the CPUs heatsink/heatpipe assembly, connected the device to power and the output to the fan.”

Working on a command line Linux system and want to watch a YouTube video? Until now you were out of luck. Warren Harding has designed a program that reads in a YouTube video and plays it using ASCII text!

“This is a concept video depicting how users can surf and even watch videos from youtube with out the use of a Graphical User Interface.
The operating System is linux fedora 6, I used the lynx text based browser to search for a video on youtube, then I dug through the source found the keys required to build a request to download the desired video. Once downloaded I invoked the shell from lynx to launch mplayer to play the downloaded video. Mplayer is a really handy media player utility, if it doesn’t see X it uses a text engine to render the video, it has support for every codec you could think of including flv.”

Microsoft is not the only player in the Multitouch computer table system. Actually, Alessandro Valli has been working on this concept for many years. Have a look at the latest work out of Natural Interaction.

“SensitiveTable’s interface, Skin, is at an advanced stage of development. Last month’s tech demo shows some of the features we are investigating. The multitouch table itself now features zero force sensitivity.”

Learning binary addition would have been more interesting if it were demonstrated using a Binary Marble Adding Machine.

Video after the jump.

“The core of the invention is a modification of the divide by two flipflop to retain the marble that falls off the right side, and keep it until the flipflop is flipped to the left by the next marble. See small diagram above right. The retention of this extra marble allows the state of the marble accumulator to be dumped. The adder would just as well add without it, but the number would have to be read off by the angle of the rockers, rather than have the device dump the count out. Really, if such an adder were integrated into a hypothetical marble computer, reading out the result as a series of marbles would be an essential element.”

Via: TechEBlog and Make

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Imagitronics from Japan shared his latest creation with us in the Hacked Gadgets forum. It’s a USB Controlled Traffic Light Status Indicator which he built to show the number of running applications at a glance.

“I retrofitted this generic “Blinking Traffic Light” with a USB module and wrote a simple Mac application to monitor my computer usage and reflect the results in by changing the stoplight.

This project was born out of the frustration after being constantly interrupted by people who could not tell that I was already busy. The alpha version of the software detects the number of running applications on the computer using Cocoa’s NSDistributedNotificationCenter and updates the light based on a user-defined threshold.”

USB Controlled Traffic Light Status Indicator

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