Back in 1959 a small garage was rented and a DIY television studio was born. The TV station was called PJ-TV because they were located in Port Jervis. They were broadcasting to its viewers instead of using the airwaves. Seems that things have come full circle, all of the big networks are turning to IP TV for a large portion of their offering and other initiatives such as TWIT and Revision 3 are solely internet based and entering the viewers homes on wires.

The 19 by 20 garage reminds me of the TWIT cottage a bit, they have recently expanded their staff and have taken over more rooms in the cottage so it’s now larger than the 380 sq foot PJ-TV garage though. For a look at the tour of the TWIT cottage that Mostly Lisa (Lisa Bettany) recorded have a look at the bottom of this article.

One day Hacked Gadgets will need to do a road trip and visit Leo Laporte at TWIT and Kevin Rose at Revision 3!

Frank has completed the next phase in the Dune Bug E Build, we saw the last build update back in May. It is interesting to see what is involved in making a normal differential into a locked differential, this process allows both rear wheels to always be powered with no slipping. The gearing has also been changed increasing the top speed of the vehicle.

“Since the internal gear ratios were unchanged the 22 tooth drive sprocket was upgraded to a 38 tooth unit as pictured here. This has bumped the top speed on level ground to approx 35Km/hr, though the chain noise is considerably louder.

Basic stats and generalizations - the Bug-E can cover 8 to 12Km from the Parallel combined battery banks, with a flat ground top speed of approx 35Km/hr, factors that affect range are Solo or Passenger driving, terrain, aggressiveness of driving.”

Robert Oschler sent in this interesting project which allows Recording Emotions with the Emotiv EEG Headset to sense your mood. Just like the read receipt tells you if and when your email was read this would let you know what type of emotion it conjured.

“EmoRate is an application that demonstrates the power of Affective Computing, a technology that allows computers to detect and react to human emotions and will change drastically the way we interact with them in our daily lives. The last barrier that has held Affective Computing back, an affordable consumer grade EEG headset, has been broken with the introduction of the 14-electrode EPOC headset, created by Emotiv systems, Inc.”

Have a look at this Levitating Rotating Globe that Alexey Sha built. Not content with the standard levitating products out there he decided to step it up a notch.

“There are many globes available today which are levitating and rotating along vertical axis. This one is the world first globe levitating and rotating along TILTED axis. It uses wireless power transmittance and geared motor inside the floating globe. In brief, frequency generator is built around micro controller, a square wave output is directed to MOSFET which drives primary coil (10 turns) of output circuit. Secondary coil forms parallel LC circuit (20 turns and 25 nF) and serves as transmitting antenna. Generator frequency can be manually tuned around resonant value to control speed of rotation.

If you are heading down to Burning Man this year make sure you wander over to the More Carrot theme camp at 5:30 and Baghdad to have a look at this Illuminatrix which is a one metre square LED matrix.

“The system is contructed of 16 custom built PCBs, each containing a PIC16F1827 microcontroller which receives data via I2C from a master board and controls 3 MAX6964 LED Drivers via I2C - one each for red, green and blue components. Each board then runs two ribbon cables of 8 RGB LEDs.

The master board is running on a PIC18F26J50, a very powerful little PIC with an awful lot of I/O capability. Its reading the animations from an SD Card formatted with FAT32 using an SPI interface, it then chunks this data up, and sends it via the main I2C bus to the slave boards.”

The prize this week is a mountaineering clasp that is sure to add some flair to your keychain or provide a cool way to clip your backpack in place. This contest will run for one week (August 28 - September 3, 2010) . Ending time is based on central standard time. To enter, identify the item pictured above and give an example of what can be done with it. You don’t need to know the make and model just what it is in general, and what this type of thing is normally used for.

Please do not give the answer in the comments.

Send an email to contest @ hackedgadgets.com with “Name the Thing Contest” as the subject, and the message body consisting of:

• The name of the item in the above picture
• An example of what the item pictured above can be used for

The winner will be chosen at random from all of the correct entries.

Below is a picture of the prize.

Renkku is able to take some great action shots with this  PIC AXE Microcontroller based High Speed Photography Trigger. The system is connected to a flash unit and triggers the flash as soon as it hears something. This makes the unit very flexible since it can then listen for almost anything. If you want to see more of these type of cool images have a look on Flickr.

“I hacked a cheap camera flash shoe so that it has a 3.5mm cable jack insted of a pc-sync cable. A 10 cm ling Pc sync cable is 10 times the price of a 150 cm 3,5mm cable. I have a Brain circuit, a Sound Detecting Circuit and a sensitive gate SCR to trigger the flash. The picaxe is not overclocked (running at 8MHz). The box has a 3.5mm jack for a picaxe USB download cable so it is easy to program more. The code is now about 400 rows (basic) with alot of white space. alot of code is taken up by the menu system. I will try to make some kind of strobe funktion to”

All speaker systems need a housing of some sort. Normally we see boring wood boxes with some holes cut in them so that round speakers could be mounted into them. There are a few companies who make some speakers which are not just boxes with holes such as the Bazooka Tube Subwoofers. Instructable user djairjr had an old vacuum cleaner which had reached the end of its life. After cleaning out some of the guts he was able to fit a woofer into it, now he has a very unique DIY Vacuum Cleaner Subwoofer.

Mike Szczys from Hack a Day shows us how to Programming Launchpad MSP 430 with Linux. The basic method that people use to program their Launchpad MSP 430 is a Windows box but for those on Linux there is still hope.

“We’ll be working with Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. When the Launchpad is connected to USB it is identified and mounted to /dev/ttyACM0. It’s not immediately apparent how to use the device but fortunately it can be done. To talk to the hardware for programming and debugging we’ll need to use MSPDebugger. For compiling our code we’ll be using the MSPGCC open source compiler package.”

If you are into audio electronic projects have a look at this ECC802S Shunt Regulated Push-Pull Tube Preamplifier. One thing about these tube amp builds is that the housing looks just as nice as the circuit construction.

Thanks Gio.

“After the success with the various Odd Block amplifiers that used a SRPP (shunt-regulated PP) driver stage I started to do some research and modeling on a SRPP. The advantages of such a line stage are much the same as those when a SRPP is used as a driver. Good linearity, low distortion, low impedance output, good power supply noise rejection and modest gain.”