DIY Blog

What to do when the global stock of instant film has been depleted? Turn your old Polaroid camera into a web cam! Re-purposing this cultural icon (is it the theme of the week?) is a great idea, bringing this classic design into the 21st century. A great gift idea too.

Long live the Polaroid Webcam [link]

I altered the time stamp so this post shows up yesterday, because I was out having a nice dinner with friends instead of writing this entry. Hope you won’t mind.

A nice little “Getting Started” guide on building electronic circuits.

Circuit Building 101 [link]

Turn a Nintendo NES controller into a retro USB flash drive that’s also a cultural icon. Now, why didn’t I think of this?

NES Controller USB Flash Drive [link]

While a capacitor the size of a 2L bottle doesn’t have any practical applications, it’ll help you understand the underlying theory behind the tiny capacitors that you can actually use.

Build your own Capacitor [link][via]

Great hack for Canon D200 owners: make a relatively cheap GPS that will transmit coordinates to the camera. Take a picture, and it gets stamped with the GPS coordinates. Not too shabby. I guess this would be great for traveling bloggers, photojournalists, or even artistic projects.

Canon D200 hotshoe GPS [link][via]

I love this: it’s cheap, effective and pretty simple to do. Basically, you take a 2$ Radio Shack piezoelectric transducer and use it as pickup. One thing bothers me a bit though: you need to drill a hole in the guitar to fit the jack. I’m quite sure there’s a way to go around this. And who cares, I don’t have a guitar ;)

I might build an acoustic bass out of scrap wood I have at home, and that sort of pickup would be perfect for it.

Cheap Acoustic Guitar Pickup [link][via]

«In this day an age of lightweight backpacking, many hikers are turning to alcohol stoves because they are super-lightweight, inexpensive, simple to use, and alcohol can be shipped in bounce boxes along the the trail. Since most commercial backpacking stoves have an integral pot stand, someone who uses an alcohol stove needs to provide one. But the same criteria for choosing the alcohol stove in the first place must also apply to the pot stand-windscreen too.»

Pot Stand-Windscreen [link]

Clarissa, Knitter-Extraordinaire, explains with great detail (if you understand knitting - I wouldn’t know) how to knit a very nice R2D2 hat.

I wish I had one.

Knit your own R2D2 Hat [link][via]

Here’s a picture I just took of the moon. I could have done better, but considering it’s like -10ºc outside and my fingers were frozen, I think it’s OK.

It’s from a Nikon D70 with n old Nikkor 300mm lens. Exposure is 2.5s and Aperture somewhere around f/8 or f/16.

«There are many situations where you might need a small amount of electricity, for instance running gate openers, safety lights, water level indicators and other low-power devices.»

These two articles will show you how to harness wind power.

Making a simple Savonius wind turbine [link & link]