Bought a cheap 12.5mm f/1.3 Computar lens designed for CCTVs and the like. Even with the appropriate adapter it wouldn't focus to infinity on my camera, only up to about a foot away, so today I shaved down the rear of the lens with my dremel. This way it can sit closer to my sensor and focus to infinity!

Modified rear of lens:


Footage shot with the lens (not the best lens by any means, a fair bit of fringing and distortion, but it was around $50 shipped and is nice and fast and wide.):

Technically this took 2 afternoons, but thats only because my dremel's cutting wheel snapped in half and I needed to go get another one. I present the xbox slim! Yeah, this has been done hundreds of times before and mine doesn't look that great. But its a nice and small media and emulator box

Sexy.

I'll have to do that to my Xbox when I get a chance. Probably paint it white, too, but then I will have to paint all my other stuff to match.

It's so easy to slim the Xbox. I had the same idea of painting it I just didn't know what color to paint it. I considered white, but I was thinking something more like red or blue.

I'm probably going to replace the Xbox Jewel with a blue led fan or something later on. This xbox is a bit screwy with the video so I will be switching out the motherboard too. I need to pick up a sata to ide adapter so I can use a larger hard drive too. 40GB just isn't enough.

I don't know if I would do all white, or leave the fins black. Probably all white because its easier. I have an 80GB HDD in mine, that's enough for the games that I play, and media can be on a network drive. I'll just have to get it working again, according to my brother, some error comes up when it turns on now.

As many of you know, it took me far too many attempts to get my portable genesis (the Neutron) working....took me 7 Radica boards (burning out 6) before I got it to work.

So what became of the remaining 6 boards?

THIS:




Plinked at 4 of them with my AR-15 from about 30 yards (open site too!)--the board in the top right is my fav from that shootout--nailed it right square in the glop-top, blowing it clean apart (Although I have to admit, that was a lucky shot lol).

The last 2 I hit with a friend's 12-Gauge...those two are only partially there (top left and bottom right)...that was all I could find of them

'twas a great way to get revenge on those little buggers for wasting so many hours (and dollars)

Here's something I finished just today. It's a USB wall charger, integrated into the wall itself. I bought a blank wall plate and cut out the holes for the USB ports, then glued them in. I used a regular LG phone charger (4.8v, 900mA) for the power source. It wasn't too hard to get it all to fit. The hard part was figuring out which breaker went to my room. It turned out to be the last one we tried. XD

Here's just a couple pics for you guys:

Good choice on the LG chargers, they have pins 2 and 3 bridged, which is the enable charging signal for most devices, so it should work on iPods and the like.

This one was actually just a phone charger, so it didn't have the second and third pins.

Really? How old was it? I know for sure that all the new LG chargers do that, because all the modern LG phones require those pins to be bridged to go into charging mode. I just had to mod a generic USB charger myself, you see, specifically for an LG phone.

I have that same charger as a bare PCB... I should do this.

You're misunderstanding me. I mean it's JUST a phone charger.



It only had two pins to begin with.

I built a benchtop power supply out of a computer PSU back in 2008. It decided to finally bite the dust. The power supply still worked, but the circuitry that powered the fan stopped working. I could have just hooked the fan up to the 12v line, but if it does not detect a fan then it limits the output current. So, instead of drilling holes in a new case, I just took the board out of another PSU of the same model and put it in.

Lemme tell you, that was not fun at all. I had to take out the banana plugs, desolder the power plug wires, take the board out, take one from another PSU, put the new one in, and resolder the wires in. That wouldn't have been so bad, except when I went to put the last banana plug in, it wouldn't fit. Turns out that there were a couple capacitors that were about a quarter-inch taller on the replacement board than there were in the old one. So I took all the banana jacks out, too the board back out, desoldered the caps from the old board, put them on the new one, and put it all back.

Then everything finally fit. I put connectors on the wires and hooked them all up, and everything works fine now. I hope I can squeeze a few more years out of it, because the PSU is from 2000 and probably already has plenty of hours on it.

Anyway, pictures.
The resistor is 10Ω and 10 watts, and is there to draw 500mA. Switching power supplies will burn out if they don't have a load. And the connector on the far right is the one that wouldn't fit. The caps I had to replace are right underneath it.






The switch on the left is the power, and the one on the right switches the fan off. I only use that when I'm trying to see how loud a different fan is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxJSUztZ3q8

This is a mod I did where I put a gamecube controller inside a guitar hero guitar, and use it to play DDR games. Weird, I know. It was a lot of fun to do though.