Okay, it’s not really a “kit”, it’s just some directions on how you can wire some commonly available gadgets (like a Nokia 6100 LCD panel or a piezo speaker) to an Arduino board and make a nice little demonstration board. Some good ideas in here.
Polyphemus Demonstration and Evaluation Kit | Popular Science.
A few years ago, Tom Duff and I each wrote an emulator for the PDP-1 so we could play the original version of Space Wars! I learned a lot about old computers in the week or so it took me to do, and I must admit that I’ve retained a fascination for old computers ever since. Tom mentioned that he has a front panel from an old PDP-11, and has talked about doing a project where he wires the front panel to a more modern machine running a PDP-11 emulator, which seemed like a cool idea. After all, modern computers just don’t have enough blinking lights. Here’s a link to a project which does precisely that using an inexpensive Zilog microcontroller over ethenet. It also includes some links to other similar and interesting projects. Check it out.
A novel microprocessor interface circuit is described which can alternately emit and detect light using only an LED, two digital I/O pins and a single current limiting resistor. This technique is first applied to create a smart illumination system that uses a single LED as both light source and sensor. We then present several devices that use an LED as a generic wireless serial data port. An important implication of this work is that every LED connected to a microprocessor can be thought of as a wireless two-way communication port. We present this technology as a solution to the “last centimeter problem'', because it permits disparate devices to communicate with each other simply and cheaply with minimal design modification.
MERL – TR2003-035 – Very Low-Cost Sensing and Communication Using Bidirectional LEDs.
Courtesy of the Make Blog, go surf over and check out these instructions for building your own projection digital clock. The idea is pretty simple: modify a cheap digital watch from the dollar store by mounting a couple of bright LED lights behind the LCD display, and then use a lens to focus the enlarged version on the wall/ceiling. Neat!
The author, Raphael Assénat, has lots of other cool projects as well: of particular interest to me was his neat article on extracting the sound hardware from a Super Nintendo and wiring it to his PC. I’m gonna have to keep an eye out for one of these at Goodwill.  Cool stuff.
[tags]Hacks,Make,Hardware,Super Nintendo,Clock[/tags]
This is just completely nuts, an 8 bit computer constructed entirely from 12 volt relays. It consumes 12 amps at 13.5 volts (160 watts). Hilarious.
[tags]Retrocomputing,Hacks[/tags]
Courtesy of hack-a-day, a student did something which I thought was rather clever, he disassembled an optical mouse, and hooked the tiny image sensor (18×18 pixels) directly to the parallel port of his computer, and wrote a program to read out the results. I can’t immediately think of what use this would be, but I think it’s a neat thing anyway.
