Some clever lads at Cornell University have adapted a classic Etch-a-Sketch so you can draw with a serial mouse. Like many projects I link to, it’s not that it’s difficult, it is just interesting that someone actually did it. It also uses Atmel microcontrollers, which I prefer over the more widely used PIC chips or Basic Stamps.

I got here by surfing through GeekDIY, a site which is exactly what it sounds like. There are lots of good projects to be had there.

Slashdot ran a story about a gadget to turn your water bottle into a tripod that can be found in Japan. Adam at fiendishthingy.org has his own Bottle Cap Tripod which can be made for $1.50, thereby singly matching the innovation (or lunacy) of Japanese manufacturers.

Obligatory useful hint: Camera tripods are threaded for ordinary 1/4″, 20tpi screws. I like using either stainless steel bolts for similar applications or nylon.

Slashdot provided a link to Neil Fraser’s 3D mouse hack. He takes the parts from a couple of mice and makes a gadget that can track positions in 3 space. Perhaps interesting from an academic view, but not really a very pragmatic 3D input device.

SENT is a Motorola Sponsored phonecam art show. If you click the link, you’ll see new photos every five seconds, many of which are pretty darned cool. You can take good pictures with mediocre cameras.

My wife does similar things with her Sidekick photoblog.

In case you are running out of geeky things to do with gadgets you could try wire a PocketPC to an Ipod to allow wireless file swapping to anyone within range of your wireless. Even if you poo-poo illegal file swapping, there are some things of interest here: namely, the use of Apple’s Rendezvous/Zeroconf/Howl stuff to discover and broadcast availability of web services from the Pocket PC. Since I don’t have a PocketPC, this hack is of limited use to me, but I think that in the future Apple’s Rendezvous technology will be more widely deployed, especially in setting up impromptu networks.

I ran across a website that claimed to be a Japanese name generator. When I tried mine out, I got 渡辺 Watanabe (near a crossing) 一真 Kazuma (one reality).

I have no idea how this works, but I thought it was cool.

Well, the plug in aquarium was completely useless, so this would have to score higher merely on the basis of utility. The iDuck USB Memory Storage Device is half rubber duckie, half USB memory drive. Strangely enough, I was thinking that I’d like a devil duck version, but I’ve been beaten to the punch.

Every once in a while, I run across a gadget so silly even I can’t bring myself to buy it. This has got to take the cake though: ThinkGeek :: USB Mini Desktop Aquarium. And you are talking to someone who actually has a computer with a fishtank in the side.

I’m tired of machines taking up several cubic feet of my under desk space, so the recent trend towards smaller machines suits me fine. I made an Spacewalker SV24 system a couple of years ago, but it is fairly long in the tooth, so I was glad to see Ars Technica: Small Form Factor Guide, a guide to building small form factor systems. Their Budget Box would make a respectable web server and could even play a few games.

Dan Lyke was musing about learning about FPGA technology on flutterby, which is a topic which has long been in the back of my mind for future projects. I rescanned the list of links I created on FPGAs a while ago, and found that Digilent has a new Pegasus FPGA board which looks promising. It uses their 50K gate Spartan 2, and includes both video and PS-2 ports and sells for a trivial $89, quantity one.

You can also look at FPGA CPU News (infrequently updated), Jan Gray’s page, or opencores.org.

Cringely mentioned the Hauppauge MediaMVP gadget in his column. It’s a semi-cute toy: a stand alone box which connects to 10 or 100 megabit ethernet, and streams media files from your PC to your television. It sells for somewhere between $80 and $100, which is pretty cheap.

What’s really interesting is it’s hack potential. According to a users forum, it contains some interesting hardware: a variant of the PowerPC made by IBM for set top boxes, 64 megabytes of RAM and an MPEG-2 decoder. What’s more, it runs Linux using Busybox, which it boots via tftp from the host PC. In other words, you don’t have to do anything amazing to get new software to it, just build the right boot images and place them in the right place. Neat.

Apparently it does not have sshd or telnetd installed on it, only

 [, busybox, cat, cp, date, dhcpc, du, echo, fpage, ifconfig, init,
insmod, kill, killall, linuxrc, ls, lsmod, modprobe, mount, mpgdec,
msh, mv, ping, ps, pwd, reboot, rm, rmmod, route, sh, sleep, test,
umount 

but it does have NFS support built into the kernel, so in theory you could mount media files from Linux/whatever boxes and play them on your TV. Again, nifty.

If this gadget were wireless, I’d be considering it strongly, but I don’t have ethernet anywhere near my television at the moment. I wonder how long it will be before you can buy a television with gadgets like this built in. I’d easily spend another $80 to have this thing inside my next television.

This website runs on a spiffy little VIA motherboard, so I was glad to see that VIA is about to release some new motherboards. You can read this preview on linuxdevices.com. The world needs more capable motherboards that draw less than 20 watts. It even has a built in AES encryption unit. That could be… useful I guess.

I’m also pretty keen on seeing one of the announced Nano-ITX motherboards. I like the idea of a full PC on a motherboard which is only 5″x5″.

A couple of days ago I was talking about small robotic flyers, I should have known that somebody at the Seattle Robotics Society would already have done something like this. Check out BXFlyer Four Rotor Helicopter for a description of a four rotor robotic flyer similar to the commercially available DragonFlyer.

Addendum: I found a link to a nice design document for a similar project. It includes a mathematical model for the dynamics of the system.

On Tech Now! this morning, I found out about the Octodog’s Frankfurter Converter. When there are products this silly in the world, can the Apocalypse be far behind?

The webpage includes a justification for the existance of such a silly novelty item.
According to them.

The method of slicing a hotdog linearly can reduce the chances of choking during consumption. A sliced hotdog is a safer way to serve hotdogs to children. Octodogs are not only fun, but may be a safer way to serve hotdogs.

Hard to argue with that. although I doubt Alton Brown would approve of this pitiful unitasker.