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DIY Warriors Saluted And Sought
WaveDave writes "I have found some really inspiring pages out there by folks who are hacking together amazingly cool low-cost hardware/software/etc projects (reminiscent of the old homebrew computer club days). With the cost of IC's, sensors, microcontrollers, and PC's falling through the floor, we've entered a time where the barriers to entry on hacking neat projects are lower than they've ever been. There are a lot of indicators of the excitement in these projects, including the recent announcement of the upcoming Make Magazine from O'Reilly. Initially blown away by Matthias Wandel's projects, I've begun to put together a small collection of links to other creative DIY-ers out there, as well as resources for finding parts, getting stuff made (like PCB's and machined stuff). My current list is here - what are some of your favorite creatives and resources?"
In the past the access to information on how to go about doing this was much more difficult and not all libaries or regeons had that information availible. Since the birth of the internet and it becoming amazingly popular the information has become much more accessible. That is also one the major reasons why there has been a fairly large explosion in the amount of "hackers" out there doing cool things with hardware/software and thier self esteem.
Hold on, you 'first posted' an article about DIY without mentioning duct tape!? And you call yourself a geek...
In terms of DIY, not many people can beat that guy
you can add to your page include:
Creative people and projects:
- http://www.diyaudio.com/ (DIY audio equipment forum)
- http://sound.westhost.com/projects.htm (audio stuff schematics)
- http://headwize.com/projects/index.htm (DIY headphone stuff)
- http://www.hauptwerk.co.uk/pedalboard.html (DIY MIDI pedalboards, just add keyboards and software and you have a MIDI organ)
- http://www.diysubwoofers.org/ (what it says)
- http://www.plasmatweeter.de/eng_plasma.htm (DIY ionic tweeter)
Places to buy stuff:
- http://www.newark.com/ (major electronics retailer)
- http://www.mouser.com/ (major electronics retailer)
- http://www.tubesandmore.com/ (components for vintage electronics)
Getting stuff made:
- http://www.olimex.com/ (cheap PCBs)
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Just remember people, there truely is no such thing as an Alpha Geek, so share 'em if you got 'em. But check your ego at the door for a more pleasant experience for everyone, yourself included. TIA for the links.
"Like fire and fusion, government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master."~RAH
mini-itx.com - many of the projects on there are very inventive...
There's a lot of DIY hacks that use Palms and iPAQs. Not seen so many using the Zaurus (which runs Linux). I have one, and would be interested in following someones example to learn myself.
The Zaurus 5500 should be an excellent choice for hacking as it have CF socket (could be used to add a hacked PCMCIA card supplying USB host), IR port and Sharp I/O which can be a serial port or USB client.
Then with the option of QT, Java or C (and even Python and Ruby). It would be easy to prototype on a laptop and then port to Zaurus.
I built a Garmin GPS to Zaurus cable. But that wasn't exactly challenging!
Anyone have any interesting links like this?
For electronic parts, you just can't possibly leave out the Electronic Goldmine. They've been around a long time, and in my experience offer the best surplus stuff you can find while charging the least they can get away with. Their bagged assortments are good, and their Electronic Surprise box is actually a good deal if you don't mind sorting through a box of jumbled parts. They also carry many standard components to round out whatever project you're doing.
If you ever want to build a CNC machine, check out TurboCNC. It's "shareware" in the sense that you are free to download and use the fully-functional, nagless program...and what a program it is. TurboCNC 3 has been used by thousands of hobby CNC'ers, and just recently TurboCNC 4 was released with lots of rewritten code, vastly improved user interface, and better stepping rates. This program will pulse stepper motors up to 30KHz on a junker 486 computer with parallel port, depending on the timer hardware. Version 4 adds Pentium timer support, resulting in pulse rates beyond 100,000Hz. The price rose from $20 to $60 with the release of the new version, but that price is if you feel like supporting Dave and his team, and will get you the full sourcecode to the program.
For cheap PCBs: nobody can beat Olimex. Yeah, they're based out of Bulgaria, and the first setup of payment can be a little tricky. But you'll get a double-sided board with plated holes, solder mask, and silkscreen...about $25 for 6" x 4" board. What's even better is that you can send them a number of files, then give them a sketch of how you want the boards arranged and repeated in the 6"x4" area...and they will panelize and cut them out for you, free. That's impressive if you've ever checked out the costs of doing something similar with other PCB houses. Many of them give the impression that it's like cheating to try to get more than one board out of the standard board size, even if your design only requires a few square inches. With Olimex I've gotten up to ten boards for that cheap price. It kind of makes you wonder what other ways you can use outsourcing, instead of whining about it and trying to make the government give your old job back.
By the way, this list has a long way to go before it's the most exhaustive I've seen. For the ultimate in DIY electronics articles and links, try ePanorama, it's been around a long time.
Back in the days of the Homebrew computer club, you literally did build a PC. These days, whacking a load of PCBs into a case isn't quite the same level of complexity. I remeber telling people I built PCs where I worked and they looked amazed. As far as I was concerned, it was nothing more complex than Lego with static. The hardest part was installing software.
Things have definately changed.
If you are interested in high quality audio, try making a gainclone amplifier - this website has more details:
http://www.decdun.fsnet.co.uk/
I made one and the sound quality is fantastic - better than any of the amps I have previously owned.
Back in the days of the Homebrew computer club, you literally did build a PC. These days, whacking a load of PCBs into a case isn't quite the same level of complexity. I remeber telling people I built PCs where I worked and they looked amazed. As far as I was concerned, it was nothing more complex than Lego with static. The hardest part was installing software.
:)
Things have definately changed.
Yeah, totally. Which was why I was surprised when I heard that one of my co-workers has designed and built (well, is building -- it's a work in progress) one ompletely from scratch. Although he doesn't mention it on the page, he's written games for it and everything. (I said, "does it have games?" and the next week it did). It's pretty much the most amazingly geeky thing I've ever seen, and seriously deserves to get slashdotted.
http://www.robotroom.com/
Robot info, projects, and stuff.
He writes books also, scroll down a bit for the free content.
Stop the world; I need to get off.
In terms of DIY, not many people can beat that guy
not many but this one, surely, can:
http://www.afrotechmods.com/,
the amazing things this guy does with a computer using only, off the shelf, under a dollar items.
see http://www.afrotechmods.com/reallycheap.htm for really great mods like the ghetto heatsinks or the paper cooled computer.....
- a bat detector
- a 3kW dimmer to control the ceiling-lights (I'm living in an old classroom)
- an iButton lock on the frontdoor
- lights in my livingroom are controlled by every phone in the house (built from a caller-id box)
- plants are beeping when soil is dry
- can control all my IR with LIRC and by phone
And almost everything is built with parts recovered from old equipment.
So, does this make me a slashdot-approved DIY warrior or am I just another techno-geek?
Niels.
Alltronics deals in surplus and salvaged components of all shapes and sizes. There was a US$15 minimum order when last I dealed with them.
I had some issues ordering stuff, though... after waiting a week and nothing arrived, I e-mailed them about it and said one of the items wasn't in stock and they were waiting for it. Would be nice if they told me that ahead of time... but other than that I have no complaints. (Got my stuff about 5 days later)
=Smidge=
I always love BG Micro's weird catalog. Don't let the yellow background throw you, it's a mimic of the colored paper they print the dead-tree version on. It's significantly less annoying in that form. Don't count on them for production quantities unless they say so, but some of the small lots of surplus stuff are super cool.
American Science and Surplus, formerly known as Jerryco carries a broader spectrum of stuff, including plastic replicas of human organs, glow-in-the-dark everything, millitary surplus and yes, a variety of electrical and electronic weirdness. If the Edmund Scientific catalog is too highbrow for you, Jerryco is sure to amuse.
There are some hardware hackers over at Green Bay Professional Packet Radio whose projects you might enjoy.
I'm also going to suggest del.icio.us as a good way to collectively manage bookmarks like these. Just go play with it.
Double Donkey Kong: http://www.mikesarcade.com/cgi-bin/store.pl?action =link&sku=DDKUP
. htm
Galaxian Multigame: http://www.btinternet.com/~mike.coates/multigame3
Atari Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back Multigame
Tempest/Vortex/Aliens Multigame
Sega Vector Multigame (Star Trek, Space Fury, Tac/Scan, Eliminator, Zektor)
Williams Multigame (Robotron, Defender, Joust, Stargate, Splat!, Bubbles)
Q*Bert Multigame (Q*Bert, FHMC Q*Bert, Q*Bert's Qubes): http://www.multigame.com/KITS.HTM
There's a multi-Pacman PCB out there somewhere, but I'm not sure who makes them anymore. I know twobits.com used to sell one, as did multigame.com. But there was some legal problems with Namco that led to them disappearing.
"You're getting brutal, Sark. Brutal and needlessly sadistic."
"Thank you, Master Control"
-Sark and the MCP
You give a URL for a project involving CVS cameras and you don't tell people to "check it out"?
Don Lancaster has an awsome site at The Guru's Lair
He wrote the 555 and ttl cookbook, used to have a Computer Shopper column on writing raw postcript, and has thousands of links and articals on DIY.
Yeah, casing is the hardest part, in my opinion. (then again, I haven't done any home made cd changers or 3d scanners either...)
I am currently learning to work with stained glass (should make some nice boxes), as well as looking for a local machinist. And don't forget about Front Panel Express, even though I'd really like to find something cheaper...
The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches. -- ee cummings
This site was mentioned here a few months back. Basically a stripped down games console, which you can buy/build and then write games/whatever to run on the hardware. The software to program the thing is included. Programming it (using assembler) is very similar to coding for the old VCS console. Since there's no video RAM (unless you choose to add it to the hardware), your code directly controls the output as the raster scans across the screen - meaning you have to actually count the clock cycles in your code to ensure you don't end up with electric soup! I think it also has sound hardware, and there's nothing stopping you adding any other mods.
;-)
There are some demos available for download on the site, with full source etc. I don't work for them or anything, but I'm seriously thinking of buying one so I can dive into some retro-coding
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
I'm partial to ExpressPCB (www.expresspcb.com) for quick-turn cheap 2-sided PCBs. They provide a rudimentary design tool for free (only works with them, though) and you can lay out a PCB one day and have 3 copies in your hands two days later for around $100.
There's someone who's done DIY duct tape? That I'd like to see!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I really enjoy both of these, some good inspiration (and a lot of perspiration), both are heavy into DIY.....
You got to see some of the home made inventions, just too cool. You can see what having an itch to scratch, a pile of junk and a welder will bring you. A lot of it results in some practical applications, some decent inventions have been showcased. I get the dead trees version, every page I am going NEAT! I want one! etc...
Farmshow magazine
This one is for alternative power, a very good site, Home Power magazine, chock fulla alternative energy products, examples, troubleshooting, resources, etc.
What would be better is a high brightness array of LED lights (white of course) to use as the white light source. Some DIY forums have noted that the problem is focusing the light from the array into a controllable direction and even intensity. This is hard because you need so many LEDs to get enough brightness. If this could be cheaply solved, then it would make a great DIY projector.
Anybody have any luck with this or know any good websites for it?
Nice links. And here's some karma whoring (not that me needs it).
Creative people and projects:
- http://www.diyaudio.com/ (DIY audio equipment forum)
- http://sound.westhost.com/projects.htm (audio stuff schematics)
- http://headwize.com/projects/index.htm (DIY headphone stuff)
- http://www.hauptwerk.co.uk/pedalboard.html (DIY MIDI pedalboards, just add keyboards and software and you have a MIDI organ)
- http://www.diysubwoofers.org/ (what it says)
- http://www.plasmatweeter.de/eng_plasma.htm (DIY ionic tweeter)
Places to buy stuff:
- http://www.newark.com/ (major electronics retailer)
- http://www.mouser.com/ (major electronics retailer)
- http://www.tubesandmore.com/ (components for vintage electronics)
Getting stuff made:
- http://www.olimex.com/ (cheap PCBs)
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
If you were 'hardware hacking' a century ago, you might have used wood, rope, nails, old buckets or glass items. These days, it's often electric/electronic stuff like sensors, stepper motors or ucontrollers. Either way, the hardware is always cheap, like ripped out of old equipment. Tradition wants it that way. If you use all new stuff, you're not hacking, but developing new hardware.
One of my good Professors here at RIT introduced me and gets copies of the magazine Circuit Cellar. They are a complete computer hobbyist magazine -- very, very good. They have everything from radio controlled robots to how to add USB to your embedded project.
Circuit Cellar
They also host contests constantly which give out free hardware for those with good design ideas! Great for those student needs!
In some ways, DIY electronics is getting harder. Lot's of logic parts are long out of production and getting harder to find. Those that are still in production are packaged in hobbyist-unfriendly ways (e.g. BGA). I know you can work with these packages with various gyrations, but it's a long way from the straightforward ease of DIPs and wire-wrap.
And an excellent use of new tech to further DIY old tech (with innovation, even!) is the AX84 tube amp guitar project. There are projects of all sizes, an excellent discussion board, and links to lots of goodies. http://www.ax84.com/ Everything from raw schematics to kits.
Building PCs from scratch was cool when there were no PCs at Walmart. But today...much like building a horseless carriage, or a vacuum-tube radio.
This is the same way electric motors used to be cool. I remember when I was a wee lad that every handyman had a few electric motors lying about, one big one usually strapped to the workbench, with a bunch of belts to power a number of different devices. Motors were still fairly expensive and bulky, so they tended to dominate the workbench.
Then electric motors became completely ubiquitous, and they mostly vanished from sight, embedded into everyday devices, hair dryers, coffee grinders, RC Cars. What became interesting was not the motor itself, but all the cool and unexpected things you could do with it once it got cheap enough, and small enough.
So yeah, a DIYer could sit down today and build a motor (or a computer) completely from scratch, but it becomes an exercise in nostalgia, like hand-crafting a canoe, or building a replica of the Wright Brothers plane. Which is cool in it's own way, but somewhat eccentric.
So the moder-day DIYer, like the scientist in Cronenberg's "The Fly," we find ourselves in the role of sythesists, taking off-the-shelf parts to make interesting & unusual new gizmos, or taking an existing technology and bringing it into the realm of the handyman's workshop.
What were you expecting?
These books are always useful:
Everybody accepts credit cards now. There's no problem ordering from real suppliers.
I have to point out the incredibly useful Atmel AVR series of microcontrollers. Inexpensive ($2 to $8 each), easy to program (there's a GCC port readily available), entirely Flash-based, and pretty powerful for eight-bit microcontrollers. There's a large hobby development community over at AVRFreaks; if you're interested in homebrewing some great projects, check it out!
seriously, it's run by Rob Cockerham who is my fookin hero. He's hardcore DIY, but not really on the tech side but more on installations for entertaining social engineering (read: pranks).
Also, check his killer Halloween costumes, which are good enough to win at the ILM party!
http://cockeyed.com
I first read articles from Steve Ciarcia in some early issues of Byte Magazine (I subscribed to Byte due to his and Jerry Pournelle's articles.) But those things are history. Go to http://circuitcellar.com/ for some interesting projects.
I'm not yet 30 and I remember the flame wars on Usenet. I regularly lurked the homebrew groups there about 8 to 10 years ago--just before and during the time I was putting together a simple wire-wrapped system consisting of an M68K and mostly 74LS series logic chips. There were two noteworthy camps:
1. The Gods of the geek world--those who'd pat you on the head and say "nice beginner project--good luck and keep it up son" at the site of project like mine. These were the types who could've been founding members of the Homebrew club back in the day, and figured REAL men didn't need a stinkin' processor to make a PC--just a bunch of SSI TTL Logic. If you really wanted to test your mettle you built it using discrete transistors.
2. The AOL generation of "home brewers" who fancied themselves experts becasue they could screw a 486 Motherboard and some cards into a PC case...they were the "home builders" and endlessly posted questions about BIOS configuration, jumper settings and IRQ conflicts.
Sadly, despite the fact that it was stated loudly and clearly in the FAQ and repeatedly in flame posts what the group was intended for, AND despite a group being put together for bome built DOS PCs, the second group still drowned out the first--DRAM refresh circuitry and address decoding was beyond their comprehension, but cross-posting was not.
Now homebrew seems to mean adding backlit LCD status panels, neon lights, cut-out windows and a coat of day-glo Tremclad. This is a fun hobby to be sure and I enjoy what comes out of it as much as I enjoy going to car shows. However, it isn't really homebrew to me. Cramming an ITX motherboard into as many odd containers as possible just doesn't have the same mystique...
DIY grappling dummy (Plus lot's of other homebrew equipment).
I heard about Phidgets - USB sensors, motor controllers, and the like - from the JMSL mailing list. They look cool - has anyone tried them out?
What's really cool these days is the amount of free software available for DIY electronics. I'm not talking about free as in GNU, but free as in beer. Want to design your own digital chips? Get your free WebPack FPGA design software. Want to do your own circuit boards? Get your free CAD software... Want to program your embedded product? Most chip companies have free development tools.
One of the coolest DIY projects around is the MegaSquirt DIY EFI kit. Designed by Bruce Bowling and Al Grippo and supported by enthusiasts world-wide, they have created a cheap and highly effective fuel injection computer that you can easily assemble with a soddering iron and a little time.
Check the MegaSquirt project out on the web at http://www.msefi.com/ or check out the software at http://megasquirt.sourceforge.net/ (disclaimer: I am one of the Project Admins). A good resource for those interested in MegaSquirt is at http://www.not2fast.com/ (which has a number of other interesting technical articles and programs), which I host through my site, wryday.com!
I built my Squirt without too much trouble, and I am no electronics whiz. It's a great experience, building your own computer, soldering transistors, resistors, capacitors and chips, and producing something quite useful. I have yet to install my MS into my project rally car (an 86 VW GTI), but you can bet she'll be flying when I dial in the fuel maps!
Bowling and Grippo have also developed other kits for related applications, such as ignition and spark controllers. Check out the http://msefi.com/ site for more info.
Cheers,
-Joe
Fire in the sky
Lots of DIY stuff here.