If you are into modded consoles have a look at this WiiCube that Hugo Dorison build and sent in.

“It is a heavily modded gamecube, trimmed to fit in a much smaller case than the original, with controls and a screen. It also is equiped with a wiikey fusion, a chip normally made for the wii, that has been adapted. Enabling the portable to play games off of SD cards, and remove the disk drive which takes a lot of space.  As for the case, I built it from scratch using Vaccum forming on sheets of plastic and implementing various pieces of official Nintendo gamecube controllers.”

 Blair Kelly has designed a fun looking RC car. It has an Arduino mounted in the car, there are a number of sensors that allow Blair to drive the car around viewing the drive on a computer screen. There is even force feedback so when the car goes over a large bump or bangs into something he can feel it. With a head mounted display this thing would be very immersive. The camera is mounted so that it can be moved from right to left. I can just imagine what it would feel like if this right and left camera movement was linked to head movements when wearing a head mount display!

Via: Make

 Thanks to Dieter Sturm for sending in his latest jet powered creation. He is putting the final touches on this Tiny Jet Powered Monster Truck. They are looking for sponsors, so if you are looking to have your name on the side of something cool I suggest you give Dieter a call right away! For his next build I vote to see a Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 stuffed onto the back of a full sized truck.

To see this thing in action be sure to watch the video after the jump.

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As you probably know The Pirate Bay is always hiding the location of their servers since governments can often cause a huge speed bump in their activity when they want to. The Pirate Bay Servers might soon be GPS Controlled Drones to allow the server farm to not only not be tied to a building on earth but it could be commanded to fly to a new location in moments. I guess this is one step down from launching a satellite but unlike a satellite these servers can’t be easily located if The Pirate Bay chooses to move the drones around on a regular basis. Of course pirating is wrong I love the innovation that is being considered to evade the authorities!

Via: Ars

“One of the technical things we always optimize is where to put our front machines. They are the ones that re-direct your traffic to a secret location. We have now decided to try to build something extraordinary.

With the development of GPS controlled drones, far-reaching cheap radio equipment and tiny new computers like the Raspberry Pi, we’re going to experiment with sending out some small drones that will float some kilometers up in the air. This way our machines will have to be shut down with aeroplanes in order to shut down the system. A real act of war.

We’re just starting so we haven’t figured everything out yet. But we can’t limit ourselves to hosting things just on land anymore. These Low Orbit Server Stations (LOSS) are just the first attempt. With modern radio transmitters we can get over 100Mbps per node up to 50km away. For the proxy system we’re building, that’s more than enough.”

Kevin Martin and Hyundo Reiner from Cornell University made this Automatic Grapefruit Segmenter for their ECE 4760 Designing with Microcontrollers Final Projects. Watch the video below to see it in operation, the system first rotates the half grapefruit looking for the thick material that divides the segments. This is done by reading the feedback from a flex sensor. Once the entire half grapefruit segment locations have been mapped the cutting begins. The rotating platform presents the segment edges to a chopping blade which cuts the segment edges all the way around the fruit. The heart of the electronics is a Atmel ATMega644 Microcontroller, it interfaces to all the motors and sensors that make the system tick. We can see lots of LEGO and scavenged parts used in the rapid prototype which is a great way to keep parts out of the garbage. I can just imagine what the junk box looks like in the Cornell ECE 4760 lab!

Looking for more interesting Cornell projects? Bruce Land has created a new Youtube channel that has a ton of the videos from ECE 4760.

Want a mouse that doesn’t look like the normal soap bar shape? Have a look at these Cool looking Computer Mice. David Allen from Zedomax has a great round up of these innovative mice.

“Where would we be without the mouse? Well everything would be slower and as for cut and paste, well forget it! Yet we seem to take the mouse for granted, just imagine life without it and now you will be appreciating the computer mouse as a key component of computing today. In this Top Five, we are going to be looking at some of the more interesting ideas when it comes to the humble computer mouse”.

We have seen lots of Wall-E designs built by fans of the movie before. Most Wall-E designs have some DIY electronics like the custom Wall-E track build we saw earlier this year. This Wall-E Engagement Ring Box may look similar to some of the DIY projects we have seen in the past with one big exception, it was built for the sole purpose of presenting an engagement ring! Michal from The Model Maker was commissioned to build the engagement ring holder for a man who obviously loved the Wall-E movie. The details are great, the initial CAD information was gathered from the Wall-E Builders Club and much of the design was laser cut from styrene sheets. The finished model looks good but after it has been painted it looks fantastic. I am sure this model will live beside the jewelry box of the lucky lady for many years to come.