HACK A WEEK

Well here we are back to the weekly projects! The down time was a good opportunity to regroup and dream up new projects ideas for the coming year.

My girlfriend Lisa has a 2007 Yamaha Virago that had a problem with its initial warm up. It just would NOT take throttle unless it sat and idled for about 20 minutes, and then it would still hesitate. It eventually just refused to start so I decided to take the carb apart and see what was going on. This was also an opportunity to shoot a how-to video. Follow along now as we get into the heart of this machine and find out why it wouldn’t run and set it straight!

Keep on hackin!

Hello! After a few weeks away from the blog I’m back with a video of the Mini Maker Faire here in Burlington, NC. Bennett and Jessica Harris did an excellent job of organizing this first time event. I had a table set up showing off Hackaweek as well as representing Make Magazine with some banners and free stuff. The crowd was steady all day long and I had a great time sharing the projects with others. Big thanks to Bennett and Jassica for putting on a successful event!

Keep on hackin!

Here it is… the bloopers!! Lisa and I spent several hours going through all the video clips from the last year! It was no easy task but it was fun, we had some great laughs and we hope you will to…

As it turns out, the final uploaded bloopers video even has an audio blooper in it! DOH!

Enjoy the video and til next time, keep on hackin!

Here we are at hack #52! Can you believe it? One year ago I dedicated my self to the production of one hack per week for a year and I’ve done it! I even moved twice in that time frame and met my girlfriend Lisa, which of course made my lifestyle change a bit. She has been super supportive throughout it all and even participated in a few projects. She’s full of ideas and we work well together so, “thank you Lisa!”

Over the next month I’ll be on vacation but I’ll be producing a year in review video and of course, a bloopers video. 🙂

This weeks project is one I’ve been thinking of building for many months. I saw some documentation of an early photographic based oscilloscope with a spinning mirror and a point source of light. It would capture a single waveform at a time on photographic film but it also showed a live view of the wave form. It was called an oscillograph which is a word derived from the Latin word oscillum, to swing, and the Greek word graphein, to draw.

I figured I could build this with a speaker and a laser but then I saw a video recently in which someone used the head armature from a computer hard drive like a speaker. The armature is really just a different configuration of a speaker or electric motor. It has a coil of wire that sits between two magnets. As the voltage fed into the coil changes it’s induced magnetic field, it moves between the north and south poles of the stationary magnet. Perfect!
My plan was to stick a laser on that arm, run a sine wave audio signal into the armature coil, point it at a spinning mirror, aim the reflected beam at a projection screen and it should produce the image of the waveform.

It took a bit of trial and error, as always, but I finally arrived at a design that works great.
So sit back, relax, and watch the creation of a Laser Oscillograph on my workbench.

Wood pallets are all over the place and can be easily turned into all kinds of things. They’re very well suited to being used to build a compost bin, which came be done in less than an hour. You’ll need four pallets, some 2″ drywall screws, a claw hammer and a cordless drill or a phillips screw driver.

Watch the video as a guide and you’ll be building your own compost bin in no time!

Keep on hackin