Daily Cup of Tech

An old computer these days is no longer a completely useless system. In fact, even though I might upgrade my main computer every couple of years, I usually take ten to fifteen years before I completely remove it from my home network and send it to that great LAN in the sky!

Here are ten twelve uses that I have discovered for that more “experienced” computer system!

And once you have read through the article and decided which exciting project you want to do, make sure you let us know by voting in the poll!

Read the rest of the story…

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It takes a special kind of person to look at an everyday object and ask, “I wonder if I could run Linux on that?” This is exactly what the people of the OpenWrt project did and the results are really impressive.

What the OpenWrt project does is take a regular old wireless router (Wrt) and replace the standard firmware operating system with an open source Linux operating system. And, since this is open source, you can now play away to your heart’s content and fine tune the system all you want.

This is not a project for those of you who do not want to get your hands dirty. Rather, if you are looking for a way to both learn Linux and also develop a better understanding of embedded systems, this may be a great choice for you.

One of the really cool things that you can do with this project is extend the capabilities of the system so that it can do things that it was never originally intended to do. Some examples include:

• Set up OpenVPN
• USB Storage Server
• Mobile WiFi Access Point
• Samba
• VNC Repeater
• MP3 Player

I really wish that I had more time to work on my copy of this project (I’m using a Linksys WRT54G that I got for under $100). I have even found sites where you can fire up your soldering gun and do some pretty cool customizing such as:

• Add a serial port
• Add a temperature sensor
• Increase RAM

So, if you want to pimp out your wireless router, this may be a perfect project for you!

Important Links

• Homepage
• Documentation
• Forum
• Supported Devices
• Installation
• Add-On Packages
• Release Notes
• Downloads
• Tutorials (Third Party)
• Customizing

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A number of years ago, HP came out with a technology called LightScribe. Essentially, it allowed your use the CD burner’s laser to draw images onto the label side of a CD-R. My first thought was, “Cool!”. My second thought was, “I wonder if I could figure out how to do this myself?”

Apparently, I was not the only one who was curious about this type of knowledge because argon on the Instructables website has developed a method of burning visible images onto CD-Rs with data.

Now please be aware that his is still in beta, as argon points out, and you aren’t going to be generating photo quality output, but it really shows some promise! This could be a very interesting way of encoding information so that it looks like gibberish but the information become apparent when you burn it to CD! Or, how about an encrypted message in an ISO? There are tons of possibilities!

If you decide to follow this project to completion, I would love to see some of your results!

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One thing that I’ve always liked about technology is that it has the ability to react to different stimuli. Be it an infrared beam of light from a remote that turns on a television, the dropping temperature in a home that turns on a furnace, or the different pressure placed on a bathroom scale that is translated into the weight of the user. So, when I say this little critter, I thought, “Hey, this would be a really neat little project for the kids on a rainy day!”

The Blinkybug is a neat little project that shows how electronic systems can interact with their environment.  The “eyes” blink whenever it detects a change in the environment.  There isn’t any really complicated circuitry and the hardest part of the entire project is getting the antennae set up just right.

The principle of this project is straight forward.  When something in the environment causes the antennae to move, it makes the “eyes” blink.  This can mean something touches them or a breeze moves them, or a temperature change causes them to expand or contract.  A neat way to “read” the environment and learn some basics of electronics and sensor creation.

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OK, people. Hang on to your beanies because we’re turning the geek meter up to 11! This week’s Make It Monday project is a bit more than just copying some code and running it on your computer. This week, we need to pull out the soldering iron and physically build some circuitry but, man, would it be worth it.

Ever since I heard about RFID tags, I thought that there could be a million uses for this technology in my home alone! Lights could come on or off as I entered the room. My front door would be permanently locked except when I was in the vicinity. The TV would switch to my favorite shows when I entered the room. I would walk up to my computer and it would automatically log me on. I could tell where my kids (or keys, or iPod, etc.) were at any time. My kitchen would automatically create a shopping list based on what’s not in inventory. (Excuse me as I wipe the drool from my keyboard.)

The guys over at DDP have come up with RFID Enabling Your Front Door (with a Parallax BASIC Stamp & 13.5 MHz APSX RW-210. As I stated earlier, this is not for those who do not have some serious soldering fu! You need to get right into the different components and wire them together yourself. But, once you have that all completed, nick84 has all of the programming for the microcontroller all ready to download.

When you are done, you will have the basics that will recognize any RFID tag this it is programmed for. Now, to figure out how to wire this into my home network!

For those of you interested in seeing this project in action, check out this little demo video:

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