DIY Segway

We recently did some team-building at work featuring off road segways, rekindling my desires to get/make one. The offical ones are a bit too pricey at £4k last time I looked!

This DIY Segway shows that they can be put together for a lot less though and although this one is more suited to the tarmac it is some good inspiration.





via Hackaday - DIY Segway recycles broken electric scooters

Emergency Quadrotor

My UAV needs to be quite big to stabley carry a payload of 1-2Kg. This thing weighs 8-10Kg and can carry another 4-6Kg!

Unfortunately it does seem to have some slight design flaws in that the fans all rotate in the same direction. Really you want opposing pairs in order to cancel out the gyroscopic rotation effect. Plus I think that you can get more thrust if the fans are below the motors rather than blowing across them.

Also I personally prefer the term quadracoptor to quadrotor.

Emergency Quadrotor

via Hackaday - One really big quadcopter that is following in the steps of the Spruce Goose

A Kick up the Backside for the Bluray Carousel

So I've had a very busy run of weekends, not leaving much time for hackery. Looks like Ben Heck has beaten me to the punch in modding a carousel. He connected his to an xbox 360. As well as spurring me on this has given me some good tips of how to do it.

The Ben Heck Show - A Real Game Changer

via Hackaday - Xbox 360 DVD changer is the ultimate in gaming laziness

Soon afterwards this other guy came out of the woodwork who had been working on a similar idea, this time for xbmc. He talks a lot about his software and the plugin but what I'm interested in at the moment is hardware.

extMEDIA

via Hackaday - extMEDIA: An XBMC disc changer interface

Great ideas, so I've made a plan breaking down the project into 3 stages. Firstly the basic hardware: actually getting the drive in and working and controlling the loading mechanism with something like a pic or an arduino. Secondly hooking the controller to the PC and working on some scripts or software to do useful things like indexing disc, load data from a bunch of discs to a harddrive, duplication, etc. And finally hooking up some of the buttons, remote, lcd panels etc to the controller for standalone control.

Obviously I don't want to wade in taking apart a £200 Bluray XL writer so to start with I am going to try to get an old spare DVD drive working in it.

Rocket Crew

One summer day at Uni, Schwar turned up with a rocket with a camera in it. We had a great time launching it a few times (and subsequently trying to find and get to where it landed).

Unfortunately we never got any decent pictures from it but I like to think it would have looked something like this...



via Laughing Squid - Videos Shot From Cameras Mounted on the Tips of Fireworks

Bluray Carousel

Before the advent of the mp3 the best way to have all your music on demand was to own a CD carousel like this. One of my friends had one at the time which lead me to the idea of replacing the CD player for one that read DVDs. However DivX/MPG4 and large harddrives rendered that idea a bit redundant before I had a chance to put it into practice. Since Blu-ray has stepped up the required storage size, added to the annoyance of copy protection in those and the PS3 game, the idea seems like a good one again.

Now that your whole music collection can fit onto a phone the price of CD carousels is pretty low and I managed to pick up a couple of CDP-CX450s on ebay relatively cheaply.

I plan to hook one up to the PS3 for games and Blu-ray movies, and the other, with a Blu-ray writer, to the PC for storage.

Total Size
400 x 25GB = 10TB
400 x 50GB = 20TB
400 x 100GB = 40TB
400 x 125GB = 50TB

Cost comparison
2TB External Hardrive 5p/GB
25GB Bluray Disc 3p/GB
50GB Bluray Disc 19p/GB
100GB Bluray XL Disc 90p/GB
125GB Bluray XL Disc tbc

So as you can see 25GB discs are already a good price, the others are coming down gradually. Also bear in mind the fact that conventional drives are more prone to fail and use more power.

Watch out for later posts to find out how I get on with this...