Back when I had more free time, I used to come up with interesting stuff.

In 2002, I fabbed up a DC-DC converter for an N64 and put it in my car...just for the shit of it.





Btw, that is indeed a computer (also with dc-dc supply) for mp3s. It was a P90 running Win98 lite and a 10gig drive, it had been in there since the summer of '99.

3/28/2009 3:44:31 PM

r12 dehumidifier with evaporater coils in a tank of antifreeze for a phase change pc water loop.

I was freezing antifreeze with that thing.

This was high school so early 2000. Parents were not so fond of 2 gallons of antifreeze in the house with cats around.



[Edited on March 28, 2009 at 3:47 PM. Reason : i think i picked it up for 20$. ]

3/28/2009 3:47:29 PM

free thinkpad flipped inside out and framed. lol

3/28/2009 3:49:39 PM

Also did an OBD-ish interface (can't remember what the standard for a 93 camaro was, but it wasn't full obd). Once the car got near 100k miles I could see the knock sensor start registering long before any CEL or loss of power problems could be detected. Good ole optispark.

3/28/2009 3:53:48 PM

^ that is REALLY cool.... What would the steps be for setting up something like that on a modern car?

3/28/2009 4:03:37 PM

You're joking right?

3/28/2009 4:11:13 PM

http://www.mp3car.com/

3/28/2009 4:20:47 PM

not sure why you'd bother doing that on a camaro, there is free software available online

3/28/2009 4:41:11 PM

I wish I owned a camera to take pics of some of this stuff..

3/28/2009 5:03:31 PM

Quote :

"not sure why you'd bother doing that on a camaro, there is free software available online "

I already had the PC embedded in there. It cost me $free in parts and probably 300-500 lines of C and VB code to make it all happen.

3/28/2009 5:31:13 PM

can I gay this thread up with a "construction/handy-man hack", since that's what I seem to be doing a lot of lately, instead of just tech-hacks?

My house has pretty crappy, 20+ year old built-in cabinets. One of the problems is that there were only 4 drawers (2 sets of 2, on either side of the sink) and there was a lot of wasted space between the drawers. The silverware drawers were too narrow to put a decent silverware tray in them. I wanted to combine the two narrow drawers into one wide drawer, but I wanted the face to look the same for consistency, and I didn't want to redo any of the cabinet facings or anything.

So I pulled out both drawers, cut up the cabinets a bit, pulled the drawers apart and rebuilt them into one wide drawer, added high quality sliders, and reattached the facing. Now from the outside, pretty much everything looks the same, but on the inside, you have an ultrawide drawer that fits multiple silverware trays, which glides in and out very smoothly.

3/28/2009 10:29:04 PM

so I put a new tankless water heater in my house. it's awesome but the exhaust needs a draft inducer to cool itself effectively. the cheapest one I could find online was well over $150. I went through my attic and found a box fan and then I found this gem at walgreens

http://www.amazon.com/SVAT-WRC101-Wireless-Outdoor-Control/dp/B000HAVVKG/ref=pd_sim_ol_1 for $4
with some clever positioning and strategic opening of the old coal shoot (my house is 70 years old) I have an effective draft inducer that's about $200 cheaper and serviceable by me

[Edited on March 28, 2009 at 10:39 PM. Reason : .]

3/28/2009 10:38:15 PM

So you have to remember to turn that fan on every time you take a shower?

3/29/2009 7:33:19 AM

no, I wasn't joking.

3/29/2009 11:18:15 AM

^^ for now, yes, it was a theory I was testing. I'll eventually wire it to the lightswitch in my bathroom.

3/29/2009 11:26:12 AM

I'm not familiar with the tankless heaters, but wouldn't the true engineering spirit thing to do be to wire a temp sensor to it so that the fan automatically comes on when it needs to?

^^ Just get a laptop and any of a myriad available connectors and software to get all that data (and more) in a prettier format.

The main reason I had to DIY that was because the '93 Camaro protocol wasn't real OBD (it was some sort of OBDI hybrid) and the connectors and software either didn't exist or was prohibitively expensive for a poor college kid.

3/29/2009 11:38:45 AM

oh...I thought that was an in-dash display.

3/29/2009 12:34:04 PM

It's a "below dash" display

3/29/2009 1:55:45 PM

lol @ the numpad

3/29/2009 3:26:50 PM

It was a P90, it could barely decode mp3s, so I didn't need any sort of real gui capabilities. I would have gone with linux but at the time it was still in the stage where you had to be a real guru to be efficient in it, and my knowledge of it was pretty limited.

All I needed was a way to display various playlists and to be able to scroll through them. I mapped the keys to macro like functions to do basically any sort of playlist loading, song starting, stopping, pausing, on the fly playlist creating, volume, that I needed.

It worked quite well really, I had it in my car for 4-5 years.

Of course a touchscreen would have been tits, but where it is sitting in my car would have made it generally impractical, and the aforementioned cash flow situation made it a bit prohibitive as well.

[Edited on March 29, 2009 at 5:44 PM. Reason : .]

3/29/2009 5:42:40 PM

Quote :

"I'm not familiar with the tankless heaters, but wouldn't the true engineering spirit thing to do be to wire a temp sensor to it so that the fan automatically comes on when it needs to?"

yes and no. as far as engineering prowess, I would do a temp sensor on a pot or pulse width modulator to have more granular power consumption as needed. basically a tankless water heater is like a backwards intercooler. when the water comes on, if you request enough hot pressure, it goes through a heat exchanger that has flames aimed on it. the percentage of coldwater going through it is supposed to cool it and in cases like my basement, a draft inducer is supposed to make up the difference. I could do something elegant, but I feel like KISS is probably the proper approach here until I can come up with better internal cooling. I have an idea for having a solenoid triggered cold water jet through a heat exchanger on the side of the unit.

3/29/2009 5:55:32 PM

Out of curiosity, is it a gas operated tankless?

3/29/2009 7:09:49 PM

yes

3/29/2009 7:23:49 PM

This was a good one:



There's also the Wavebubble portable programmable RF jammers I keep working on, with a modified antenna and gainstage design to get more power output. Don't think it gets more haxor than them, heh.





Gotta take some pictures of the new one with its internal antennas at some point.

3/29/2009 8:24:48 PM

What is the first one?

3/29/2009 9:42:13 PM

Not to knock your leet hax0r skills, but wouldn't it be better to spend the money and do it properly with the exhaust than to rig it?

That's not some shit to be playing with.

3/29/2009 10:04:07 PM

the exhaust is sealed, I'm not actually using the fan there. the fan goes over the fresh air intake louvers on one side

3/29/2009 11:09:24 PM

Fail Boat: had to wait 2 weeks to get the cable repaired, so I went to extreme measures to leech internet off somewhere else (no networks near me). Hooked up a high-gain 2.4ghz antenna to a Linksys WRT54G . . . . . worked pretty well.

3/30/2009 12:13:14 AM

seriously.... I am not about to start playing l33t hax0r with my natural gas appliances

3/30/2009 7:32:33 AM

Quote :

"Hooked up a high-gain 2.4ghz antenna to a Linksys WRT54G . . . . . worked pretty well"

How well did it work? I bought this guy awhile back

http://www.l-com.com/item.aspx?id=22299

and I can pull my next door neighbors signal in really solidly, but various other APs that I can vaguely pick up with a netgear pcmcia card in my laptop don't necessarily get pulled in or boosted very well.

3/30/2009 7:50:08 AM

3/30/2009 1:17:00 PM

^ LOLS

3/31/2009 12:01:01 AM

3/31/2009 9:23:49 PM