BuffaloFeeds » Hack A Day » September 21, 2009

Hack A Day (9 unread)

Six monitors, one video card

Posted: September 21st, 2009, 6:53pm MDT by Chris Gilmer

With most of us utilizing at least two monitors these days in our day to day operations, six monitors, while an awesome thought, might seem a little too excessive. After all, do we really have space for multiple video cards? AMD has a new setup in their testing lab that is running six Dell 30inch displays [...]
Virtual pool, real-world interface

Posted: September 21st, 2009, 5:00pm MDT by Phil Burgess

Sunday we saw robots playing pool and an augmented reality pool game. Today we’ll complete the pool trifecta: virtual pool using a real cue stick and ball in another vintage video from Hack a Day’s secret underground vault. The video is noteworthy for a couple of reasons: First is the year it was made: 1990. There’s been much buzz lately over real-world gaming [...]
Toilet and Figlet

Posted: September 21st, 2009, 4:00pm MDT by Mike Szczys

We thought [Kristofer's] Tech Tip about using figlet with scripts was kind of fun. It’s a throwback to the days of logging onto a BBS and being greeted by a vertically scrolling ASCII art image that had been meticulously hand crafted (although a lot of the coolest stuff was actually ANSI art). No hand crafting [...]
Defocusing LED Clock

Posted: September 21st, 2009, 3:06pm MDT by Devlin Thyne

[Dennis] has created a well-documented and very beautiful clock in his latest project. This clock stands out from the other clock projects we have covered with its unique display. The seven segment LED displays mounted on a sled that moves them back and forth behind an array of fiber optic lenses, effectively taking the display [...]
Tweetidor, the tweeting humidor

Posted: September 21st, 2009, 2:00pm MDT by Matt Schultz

As cigar aficionados will tell you, cigars should be stored in climate controlled humidors to keep them in best condition for smoking. Most of the time a humidor is just a simple air-tight box with a hygrometer attached, which measures the relative humidity inside the box. Feeling as though he needed more control over the [...]
BlokClok – Abstract time display

Posted: September 21st, 2009, 1:00pm MDT by Mike Szczys

Clocks made from blinking LEDs always make for fun projects. [Earthshine] built a clock that displays time abstractly using an 8×8 RGB LED matrix. The video embedded after the break illustrates how to read the time but here’s the gist of it: One LED is illuminated in the outside box of LEDs and moved in [...]
MP3 Hand Grenade

Posted: September 21st, 2009, 12:00pm MDT by Mike Szczys

One man’s useless machine is another man’s treasure… or something. [Matt] shared a link to his MP3 gr3nade in the comments of our useless machines post. The project took a decomissioned hand grenade and shoehorned an MP3 player into it. His decision to locate the headphone jack where the safety pin goes is a nice [...]
Eee PC NAS

Posted: September 21st, 2009, 11:08am MDT by James Munns

Hack a Day reader [The_Glu] shared with us a project of his. He used an Eee PC 701 he had lying around with a broken LCD, along with three 1TB SATA drives to create a custom NAS server for his house. The server features a number of other interesting components, including USB2SATA converters to connect [...]
Stop light for HotWheels

Posted: September 21st, 2009, 7:28am MDT by Caleb Kraft

[Paul] wrote in to show us this little project he did for his kids. His children love playing with their toy cars. In an effort to give them even more fun while playing, [Paul] built a stop light for them. He’s using an ATtiny13 to run them and has the source code available on his [...]