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I was thinking the same thing some nine or ten months ago. It really is curious, especially with so many people doing DIY turbine-building and other people doing DIY power generation via the harnessing of rotary kinetic motion, well I guess it's just a matter of time-to-convergence, really.

I think the biggest challenge right now is mounting a turboshaft that can handle the stresses? It needs to be balanced and mounted with great precision. Also, you can't have an alternator spinning at 60,000 RPM because it'd have to be built such that it wouldn't fly apart at such speeds. The solution I've been able to come up to this issue is the idea of a worm gear reducer to turn the low-torque high-speed shaft motion into high-torque low-speed shaft motion to drive a large, slow (~2000 RPM), heavy PM generator or alternator.

Also, I think that the turbine and/or the worm gear arrangement might benefit greatly from some of this great NanoLub stuff. (although the crankcase inside a conventional piston engine is probably a much better place for it)

I have great faith in the eventual development of hybrid foil and magnetic bearings that could bear the multi-axis load of a turbine, giving us the 5million+ hour MTBF turbines we all want. Whether this sort of thing will ever be within the reach of the DIY consumer, well, remains to be seen.

I hand-built serial cables using plugs I got from this guy (Elsewhere on that site there's links to folks all over the world selling the same plugs for a range of different GPS receivers). Apparently even the tiny little Garmin Geko 201 and Geko 301 (but not the 101 model) also speak serial - and they're tiny cute little things they are!!!

My little eTrex has a menu with a whole bunch of different 'languages' that it will speak (and/or receive) via the serial port. According to the manual (warning: pdf) (page 45) it speaks NMEA 0183, a bunch of proprietary Garmin stuff and a couple of flavours suitable for differential work. I know from fiddling with mine that it also speaks a 'plain text' (they're all plain text, but this one is more so) format that is quite human readable and probably quite easily parseable with some perl.

Another imporant point about GPS and Linux (*nix in general is time). GPS requires incredibly accurate time to operate, so by implication GPS receivers make excellent clocks. Last time I checked xntp had support for NMEA (GPS) as a time source.

A quick freshmeat (if 'google' is a verb, then surely 'freshmeat' can be one too!) will tell you that GPS on *nix is nothing new!!! (Not all of those returns are gps nav related, but there's a lot of stuff to parse gps sentences, moving maps, program receivers, all kinds of goodies!

The old D1X supports this natively too.

http://nikonimaging.com/global/products/digitalcam era/slr/d1x/

I hacked up a cable to plug into my D1X, as they didn't provide one. Not sure if the D2X's interface is similar or not.

Here's a link to an outfit that will apparently sell you a premade one for the D1X : http://pfranc.com/projects/g45contr/nikon.htm

That's very true. Back in my highschool electronics class one of the projects I did was the Larry's Casio calculator to PC link cable. The guy who has the patent on it is really nice, and his patent (apart from being technical) is straitforward and understandable. And his whole purpose for patenting it was to share his knowledge. He also provided me with a rare part needed that I was unable to find locally. That's the type of person who makes the world a better place.

That's very true. Back in my highschool electronics class one of the projects I did was the Larry's Casio calculator to PC link cable. The guy who has the patent on it is really nice, and his patent (apart from being technical) is straitforward and understandable. And his whole purpose for patenting it was to share his knowledge. He also provided me with a rare part needed that I was unable to find locally. That's the type of person who makes the world a better place.

Cool bonus: "open source", roll-your-own accessories for it. Check out pfranc.com -- this guy will send you adapters that he presses in his home plastic molding system on the honor system. You can then use the adapters to make serial cables for half the cost of the retail version. He calls it the first "sharehardware" project.

A nice side-effect of this approach to low-emission hybrid vehicles is that we get a lot of interaction between the model airplane community and the experimental automotive community which could have some surprising results -- like jet backpacks such as those portrayed in the movie "Rocketeer".