Category: DIY

Underwater CVS Camcorder hack

Underwater CVS Camera Mod

What a fantastic mod! I love the magnet and the reed switch. 

Connect this one to the contacts of the record button and mount it on the back of the case, right under the screen. Now, waving a magnet by the bottom of the screen will start and stop recording underwater, without breaking the seal of the case.

I’ve often thought of building an underwater case for a camera but doing the interfaces for the buttons has always been a daunting task. For a while I was thinking I would use a water proof IR remote but never worked quite right. Plus it was a pain to mess with underwater. The magnetic switches are perfect. I wish I would have had this while I was on the beach…

Underwater CVS Camcorder

Hitachi Mechanical Toys

Simple and not so simple mechanical toys from the engineers at Hitachi. The designs are quite clear and should tickle your brain to come up with ones of your own. The ‘south’ pointing car is a classic design that could have some use as a maze solving robot, or at least one that keep track of what was was south when it started.

[via MAKE fourm] 

HITACHI : ????? : ????????????

Translated page via Google 

Cheap ‘n Easy Digital Picture Frame

Sub $100 digital frame

 

 

 

Add one part Sony PS1 LCD screen and one part SanDisk Digital Photo Viewer bake for half an hour in a slow oven and you get a sub USD$100 digital picture frame. (I’m kidding about the oven part). I have an TFT LCD screen that I wired up as a remote TV monitor a few years ago that would be perfect for this. I’ll have ro find one of those SanDisk Digital Photo Viewers and build one of these. Funny, I remember seeing one in a store and I thought that it would be the perfect thing to load up and send to the relatives for them to see pictures of the kids. Now I can add a screen and presto! Zero instalation (ok, grandma will have to attach the wall wart, but that’s pretty easy). With 32 MB CF cards costing next to nothing this might be fun to do.

[via MAKE] 

Cheap ‘n Easy Digital Picture Frame

DIY – Alcohol Backpacking Stove

Penny alcohol burner

As many of you might have seen I recently posted a project for gutting an old light bulb in order to make other things out of it. Well one of the  great uses a resurrected light bulb has is as a small vessel to boil liquids in. As long as you don’t confine the gasses crated by the boiling you should be OK, the glass is thin and won’t take all that much pressure. This DIY camping stove would make a great heat source for boiling water in a light bulb. Plus, you can take it with you when your in the woods. How neat is that?

[via Google] 

Penny Alcohol Backpacking Stove

LED Christmas Lights Hacked to Low Voltage

LED Christmas lights

I saw this and just had to share. You know those very neat LED Christmas lights that you could find on the clearance tables a few months ago, you remember them now because your going to kick yourself for not buying a crap load of them. Anyway, ‘ol Joe has a tutorial on how you can hack them to run on low voltages, like 12VDC. Just like the voltage you get from your computers power supply. I think you can see where this is going…

Red-tag Joe’s introduction to LED lighting and how to connect 120 volt LED christmas lights for low-voltage applications redtag