The other day I had a chance to play with a Morley RWV Rotating Wah pedal that was made in about 1973. It had the standard volume pedal that became a wah pedal when you pushed a button. It also had another button that activated the “rotating sound” effect which was achieved with an oil can delay. I’d heard about these devices before but I’d never seen one. Of course I had to take the pedal apart to see what was inside.
The Apple iPhone is out and ifixit was kind enough to save us all the trouble of breaking our brand-new toys by taking one apart for us. You know you want to see what’s inside…
UPDATE: ifixit is now offering online guides detailing how to replace various parts of the iPhone. Definitely worth a look if you want to tear yours apart.
Matthias Wandel built an impressive binary adding machine using wood and marbles. You load the binary numbers you want to add in the top, placing a marble wherever you want a ‘1’, then a series of mechanical flipflops does the adding. The resulting number is dumped out the bottom for reading. There is a video on the site of the machine in action.
Don Herbert, more commonly known as “Mr. Wizard”, died yesterday at the age of 89. Don was responsible for getting many of us interested in science, with his shows “Watch Mr. Wizard” in the ’50s and “Mr. Wizard’s World” in the 80’s. Thanks for everything, Mr. Wizard. You will be missed.
Multiplexing an LED display is a great way to cut down on the number of I/O pins you need to use on your microcontroller, etc. to drive the display. If you are using standard common-cathode 7-segment numeric displays, for example, you would hook the CC from each digit to a separate I/O pin, then connect each group of like-segments to their own I/O pin. If you had 5 digits, you would need 12 I/O pins instead of the 36 you would need if you connected each LED separately.
The great thing about LEDs is that since they are diodes they only light when the current flows in one direction. You can use this fact to cut your I/O pin count down even further. In our 5-digit example above you would only need 8 pins!
Normal Multiplexing:
CD-Rs have made audio playback for theatrical productions much easier than it was back in the day. You get instant random-access cuing, instant start, track titles and you can make changes to your sounds faster than real time. One of the downsides of CDs is that they only will play 2 tracks at a time (Left and Right). Many productions could benefit from additional tracks, whether it is for true surround-sound or you want to have a separate speaker for each sound source onstage. There are many computer and tape-based solutions available, but turns out that it’s not only possible but fairly easy to get 5.1 channels from a regular CD player.
So you spent a whole $20 for your Lite F/X fogger so you can use it in your haunt, play or whatever. You are nervous because your fog cue has to be right on time or the whole effect is ruined. The critical moment arrives, you push the button and nothing happens! The fogger doesn’t want to make fog right now because it is busy heating up.
I’ll show you a quick, easy and free mod for these cheap foggers so that you can get a burst of fog any time you need it regardless of what the heater is doing.
This article shows how you can overclock or underclock Nintendo’s latest handheld console, the DS Lite. The mod allows you to switch between four different speeds, ranging from .66x to 1.8x, right in the middle of your game. The wireless even works no matter what speed you are running. You can use a combination of the DS’ own buttons to control the speed so there’s no need to mount any external controls and mess up the look of your DS. The power LED will blink to tell you which mode you are in.
“Overclocking old Game Boy Advances is great, but what about what I’m playing right now? Can you overclock a Nintendo DS?” After some research, it turns out the answer is “yes”.
A few people have written me asking if it is possible to overclock a Game Boy Micro. After all, that is the only GBA variant left to mod. The short answer is “yes!”. It’s not ideal, however. The first problem is that the power LEDs on the Micro don’t stay on all the time, so you can’t use them to indicate which mode the GBAccelerator chip is in unless you add extra parts to invert the LED output or rewire them completely. The biggest problem is that the Micro is so small that the GBAccelerator chip barely fits inside. It does fit on top of the CPU, but that puts some pressure on the back of the LCD and makes me a little bit nervous about damaging it.
If you are one of those people that can’t stand not modding something, then I say go for it.
