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[Dino Segovis] is at it again! For this week’s installment of his “Hack A Week” series [Dino] is holding a guitar pickup winding 101. Professional guitar pickups can cost hundreds of dollars, but are all essentially a permanent magnet wrapped in a bunch of wire. Using some cheap headphones, magnet wire, and a spare bolt [Dino] produces his own pickup and throws it in a one string blues guitar. This is a great beginner’s project as it involves only a few very easy to find parts and touches on some interesting concepts such as inductance and magnetic flux.
The premise is really simple: Sandwich the headphone magnet between two plastic discs to make a spindle, hot glue a 1/4″ bolt to the spindle, connect to a power drill, and wind a few thousand loops of magnet wire onto the thing. Hook your coil up to an amp and lay down a jam.
We might be tempted to add a counter to the rig using a reed switch connected to the “=” key of a cheap pocket calculator, and a magnet glued to the bolt. We have also seen a more complicated automated spool winder but [Dino] is keeping it nice and simple.
Check out the video after the jump to hear [Dino] go all Seasick Steve on us.
[PunMaster] wrote in to tell us that he has just released the first public demo of FiSSION Project. It’s a homebrew 3D game engine for the Wii. He’s hoping it will make development easier for other people that want to get into the Wii hacking scene. The project was originally spun out of similar work he was doing targeted at XNA for the 360. This is just a demo to generate interest in the project and hopefully get some feedback as to what’s needed to make a full release possible.
A few weeks ago we held a pre-order for the Bus Pirate V2go, the first official Hack a Day hardware. We had initially hoped for a group purchase of 20 or 40 Bus Pirates, maybe 200 if it was extremely popular. In total, nearly a thousand Bus Pirates will be made.
The first 350 Bus Pirates (pre-order 1) have already been manufactured and tested. Seeed Studio has done a great job handling the orders, pre-order 1 should start shipping more than a week early. How long will it take to get to your mail box? It will vary for everyone, but our packages usually arrive from Seeed in 7 days.
Seeed sent us pictures of the Bus Pirate depaneling, programming, and quality control process. Check them out after the break.
A panel of Bus Pirates.
Depaneling, also known as cutting a big sheet into individual circuit boards.
Visual inspection of each Bus Pirate.
Programming the unified bootloader/V0g firmware via the ICSP header.
Testing the bootloader and terminal interface after programming the firmware.
Completed Bus Pirates are stored on anti-static foam, we like the shiny quality control stickers.
Individual Bus Pirates are cut out for packaging.
Finished Bus Pirate packaged in an anti-static bag.
A box of Bus Pirates ready for handling.
One Bus Pirate, ready to ship. This might be be yours.
It looks like Sony and [George Hotz] have reached an out-of-court settlement in the case brought against the hacker who is more well-known as [Geohot].
This is the end (we think) of an ongoing saga that originally drew our ire when Sony remove OtherOS support as a sledge-hammer-type fix for holes that [Geohot] found in the security system used by PlayStation 3 hardware. Our beef with that move is that it punished people who bought a PS3 knowing that it could run Linux natively, only to have that rug retroactively pulled out from under them. [Geohot] then went on to publish details that allow those with the proper skills to leave a smoldering pile of slag where Sony’s hardware security used to reside.
They slapped him with a lawsuit for publishing those details. This settlement doesn’t have him admitting any wrongdoing. We’re not going to editorialize on the morals or ethics of [George's] actions, but we do still think that Sony greatly overreacted at several points along this unfortunate string of events.
[Thanks Buggs187]
[Bill Fienup] and [Barry Kudrowitz]‘s robots, The Automatos, have been leaving a sticky path of destruction all over the internet. Their sole purpose: to crap ketchup. They accomplish this feat by dumping a CO2 cartridge into a ketchup bottle at the push of a button, leading to some pretty awesome results. While the details are a little sparse it appears that they are using RC cars for the base and a small air gun CO2 cartridge to push the ketchup. The latest version aka the Atuomato 4 appears to be multi-actuated and can shoot more than once for maximum ketchup proliferation. See some videos of it in action after the break.