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Hack A Day (8 unread)

Leapfrog Didj: Followup

Posted: February 3rd, 2010, 1:00pm MST by James Munns

Yesterday we mentioned the Woot! sale of the Didj, and we had some comments and emails from readers who had purchased one. We couldn’t resist either, and ordered a couple to take apart and modify. We will probably be following the work laid out by [Claude Schwarz], who seems to be one of the leading [...]
Print your own pizza

Posted: February 3rd, 2010, 12:00pm MST by Mike Szczys

If you think there’s never enough computerized numerical control in your life perhaps the pizza plotter should be your next project. This is a large 2-axis machine that shoots pressurized sauce onto a pizza crust. It’s a food-grade RepStrap and appears to use a garden sprayer as a reservoir. They learned their lesson when a [...]
Lego spider-bot

Posted: February 3rd, 2010, 11:00am MST by Mike Szczys

[MkMan's] LEGO spider robot combines pieces from a Mindstorm kit with a few milled plastic parts. The legs are a locomotive concept called a Klann Linkage. They operate in pairs and convert the rotational force from one motor into movement for two legs. Here, a total of four rotating gears moves eight legs, besting the [...]
Amplifier built inside a 9v battery

Posted: February 3rd, 2010, 9:51am MST by Mike Szczys

It’s pretty creative to use a 9v battery as an enclosure. That’s what [Osgeld] did when building this amplifier. There are several advantages; they’re easy to find, it keeps a bit of the dead battery out of the landfill, and this method provides a built-in connector for a 9v power source. In this case the [...]
Ask a winner updates day 4: Answers

Posted: February 3rd, 2010, 8:00am MST by Jakob Griffith

Not too long ago we asked our readers what they would like to hear about from the PUSH N900 winners and their hacks. We got some silly questions, and some serious, we asked both and now the PUSH teams have answered. Solderin Skaters are really making progress. They’ve gotten their printed circuit boards and mounting equipment [...]
PHP runtime rewritten, by Facebook?

Posted: February 3rd, 2010, 7:00am MST by Jakob Griffith

Yes, its true. Facebook has completely rewritten the PHP runtime to make it faster and more efficient, and its completely open source. Named HipHop, its described as a source code transformer, changing PHP into optimized C++ which is then compiled using g++. Thus keeping the best aspects of PHP while taking advantage of the performance [...]
Foil impressioning defeats security locks

Posted: February 3rd, 2010, 5:16am MST by Mike Szczys

Apparently it’s been around for fifteen years but using foil impressions to pick locks is new to us. This is similar to using bump keys but it works on locks that are supposedly much more secure. This method uses a heavy gauge aluminum foil to grab and hold the pins in the correct place for [...]
The mechanical diode

Posted: February 3rd, 2010, 2:10am MST by Mike Szczys

A diode allows current to travel in only one direction. With that in mind, [Alex] built a mechanical diode that will only allow gear rotation in one direction to be transmitted through the system. But wait, by connecting two of these devices together he’s built something of a mechanical rectifier. An electrical rectifier converts alternating [...]