Category: DIY + Hacks

With all of the casemods I’ve seen for the Nintendo Wii, I’m surprised that I haven’t come across any Mario-themed designs in my travels. I guess it was only a matter of time before everyone’s favorite little plumber got his due.

The only thing worse than taking a paintball pellet in your ass is when your return fire won’t end up inflicting the same pain on your opponent. That’s what you have to look forward to if you end up going toe-to-toe with this robotic foe.

Have some old computer gear lying around? Why not do what this guy did, and turn it into something useful once more. By taking an old Apple 5-1/4″ floppy drive he found at a thrift store, then working some electronics wizardry on the interior, modder Jeff Kobi took this old piece of tech junk and gave it new life as a retro-styled amplifier.

Already sick of playing the piano on your iPhone? Maybe it’s time to hit the drums. Developer MooTheCow has created this homebrew drum machine application called “Drummer” that runs on the iPhone or iPod Touch. Drummer can play up to 15 unique audio samples (one on each finger touch pad), and takes advantage of multi-touch capabilities, so you can play up to five sounds at once.

UTIII is one of the few console games out there that really lets gamers create their own unique maps. I don’t mean just moving a few things around like you can with Halo 3’s Forge mode.

While a few of us are are patiently awaiting the release of Apple’s application SDK for the iPhone and iPod Touch, crafty (and impatient) developers have found ways to run plenty of their own applications on the popular media players.

So what happens when you take the system sounds from Windows XP and Windows 98 and carefully arrange them in a music sequencer? Something pretty unexpected, I’d say. This is truly a case where the whole is definitely greater than the some of its parts.

I don’t know what’s in the water this week, but I seem to have a serious music theme going on here. Do you like to play piano? Got an iPhone? Well, if you happen to have jailbroken yours, you can now turn it into a musical instrument.

One of the most popular computers from the 1980s, the Commodore 64, is having a minor renaissance as an electronic musical instrument. The C64’s audio chip is famous for producing an array of warm, familiar 8-bit beats and blips.

Here’s a cool hack which uses an old oscilloscope to play an accurate game of the arcade classic, Tetris. Engineer Lars Pontoppidan created Scopetris using an AtMega32 micro-controller to drive the beam of an oscilloscope to mimic the game play of the classic Soviet puzzle game.

Why print on boring old paper, when you can get your message across on some nice bouncy ping pong balls? The appropriately named PingPongPrinter can print dot-matrix messages directly onto the spherical surface of ping pong balls.

I don’t know what it is about the PlayStation 3, but there are very few people out there who’ve dared to attempt any sort of casemodding for the shiny black console. So I was tickled when I came across this PS3 mod which cleverly integrates the curvaceous lines of Sony’s latest gaming system.

While most of you are tuned in to the Superbowl, a little bird whispered in my ear to let me know about the latest portable console creation by modder extraordinaire Ben Heck. I give you the Xbox 360 Elite Laptop.

The guys over at Computer Choppers (who previously gave us the gold-plated MacBook Pro and the digg casemod) have a new trick up their sleeves. Working their secret alchemy, they’ve managed to coat the matte aluminum surfaces of Apple’s latest 24-inch iMacs with shiny chrome and other metallic platings.

Want to get your point across? Why not say it with light? This new kit lets you create your own custom LED light board using any pattern you want. The whole thing reminds me of a modern-day Lite-Brite.

Here’s a fun weekend project for all you hardware hackers out there. The Ybox2 is the latest version of a programmable IP-connected set top box which can fit entirely inside an Altoid box. The system can be programmed to display widget-like channels on your television, using a library of freely-available software.