Not only do we teach you how to nerd-out your house, but we also show you how to nerd-out for the holidays.  Here is a pretty ingenious Christmas Tree ornament that you could put together in a matter of minutes.  This is a very cheap, easy, and fun way to add some tech to your Christmas Tree this holiday season.  A since today at sundown marks the beginning of Hannukah for our Jewish friends out there you should check out Evil Mad Scientist Deluxe LED Menorah Kit.  Happy Christmahanakwanzika to all, and to all….um see you tomorrow?

The tutorial does require soldering. Enjoy the tutorial below. If this project inspires you make your own LED ornaments, please share it with us! I’d love to see them!

Materials:
— 3″ Head Pins {6} Any conductive wire can be used—brass, nickel and copper jewelry wire works great.
— Beads (with a large center-hole to fit head pin AND wire wrap wire)
— Crimp Beads {6} *optional
— 3 or 5mm LED
— Wire Wrap Wire {12″} You can substitute wire wrap for any other thin insulated wire
— Metallic Magnetic Jewelry Clasp
— 3V Coin Cell Battery
— Solder

Tools
— Needle-nose pliers
— Wire cutter and stripper
— Soldering Iron
— Glue Gun

Step One:

String the beads on the head pin, leaving at least 1/4″ of the pin free on opposite end. If you have crimp beads handy, add a crimp bead at each end to prevent the beads from moving. Repeat four times, creating a total of 5 beaded pins.

Step Two:

Cut the wire into one 8″ and 4″ piece. Strip 1″ of wire off both ends.

For the 6th pin, string the beads along the 8″ wire AND pin. (If the center hole of a bead is too small to fit both the wire and pin, string the bead on the pin only.)

Step Three:

Using wire cutters, trim the LED leads to about 1/2″.

Step Four:

Insert the LED in between two beaded pins, one with the wire and one without the wire.

If the LED lead fits, secure the lead inside the last bead of each pin, making sure the LED lead and pin overlap.

Solder the LED lead to the beaded pin with the wire, making sure that you do NOT solder the wire accidentally. You will be soldering the wire to the opposite pin.

Wrap the stripped end of the wire around the LED lead and pin (without wire). Solder, creating a nice solder joint.

To see the rest of the tutorial by Syuzi please visit [Fashioning Technology]

Casey an engineer in Houston with a love for video games came up with a simple cheap and awesome IKEA hack using off the shelf parts…no pun intended.  Let’s just get this out of the way right now, your shelves suck compared to this awesome feat of nerdiness.

“Here’s a little project I came up with using some Lack shelves to add some flair to my game room. Using some tape, paint, and a lazy afternoon I put together a Donkey Kong homage to keep my old systems on. The ladders were made from 1/4″ square wood and the barrels are beer cans painted…Turns out having shelves at a dramatic angle causes things to slide off, I vaguely remember something about that in physics.”

Take a look at the actually shelves below.  Simply awesome, good job Casey.

[via Alcohol and Nightswimming by way of IKEAHacker]

Feel like you are missing something in your life? It’s probably because you don’t have your own batsignal. Fortunately, thanks to Philipp Tiefenbacher, you can build your own with these plans to make a batlamp. Designed around a high brightness RGB LED and an Arduino, it’s actually a general purpose projector that you can use to program your own lightshow. Now, where did I put that laser cutter?

[Thingiverse via Make]

Help an old dresser take a walk on the wild side. Free that furniture from a life of simply holding folded cardigans and T-shirts. Turn it into a homemade bar with this customizable tutorial.

Ubernerkle and his wife were having friends over for Thanksgiving. To facilitate and be frugal, they turned a closet into a dry bar with the addition of some shelving units. Inspired by the simple dry bar, they followed up on the project by turning an old IKEA dresser into an actual bar, and some more shelving units into storage behind their new dresser-bar. Check out the video below to watch the transformation process:

If you have a tale of re-purposing or flat out rebuilding furniture to give it new life, let’s hear about it in the comments.

So I’ve been looking to awesome out my car with a decent dock that’ll integrate my iPhone into my car. I’m not looking for anything special, just something to hold my phone and keep it within arms reach. I also want to charge my phone when it’s juice is low and stream some tunes. I bought a griffin TuneFlex for around $35. It worked great. It has an integrated 3.5mm audio out and charger. The CLA (cigarette lighter adapter) has an attached goose neck extender that swivels and stays in position. The dock portion (let’s call it the seat for the sake of this article) is mounted on a connector which rotates 360 degrees and ratchets/locks into 9 preselected positions. This solution was perfect, I used a cassette adapter plugged into the 3.5mm connector of the TuneFlex to stream music from my music library and Pandora.  After a few months of awesome, the ratchet mechanism stopped doing what it’s supposed to… ratchet and lock. The techy nerd in me wouldn’t accept such desecration to the finest technological advancement of modern history… yea, that’s right, the Iphone.

I set out to find a replacement with little success and honestly I didn’t want to shell out another $30-$40 on something that wouldn’t last. This is when I decided to take matters into my own hands… I set out to build a dock that will last longer than a couple months. There are a few requirements that this dock needs to satisfy:
1) Must provide mechanical stability
2) Charge the phone
3) Allow me to stream music from the phone to the car stereo
4) Not cost an arm and a leg
To satisfy the first design requirement, I needed something that fits the phone and is somewhat aesthetically pleasing. The seat of the FlexTune is very well design and could possibly be the best thing about the TuneFlex, so I decided that it’ll be the heart of the dock.
The simplest and cheapest way to charge the phone and stream music is by utilizing a cable that has a 30pin ipod/iphone connector at one end and USB A & stereo 3.5mm connectors at the other. A quick google search led me to the site of Rad Tech and they had what I needed for around 20 bucks. This took care of requirements 2, 3 and 4.
Now for the assembly… I used two screws to secure the seat to two button caps on my dash. I ran the 30pin cable through the holes for the button caps and down the side of the center console. I snaked the cable around and pulled it out by the bottom of the center console. The 30pin connector of the cable fit perfectly in the seat without any dremeling. A 3.5mm male to male adapter and a couple of tie wraps later I had an awesome car dock for the finest technological advancement of modern history.
Check out the pictures!

[David Cranor] has managed to fit a fully working Uzebox system into an old NES controller. Uzebox, an open source gaming platform based on the ATmega 644 and an AD725 NTSC encoder, is one of a couple systems that are becoming more and more widespread and accessible. There are a number of ready-to-go Uzebox kits available, but for the more hands-on types, [David] has been very generous with his schematics and step by step instructions. These schematics can all be readily reshaped, and would easily fit into controllers with less fun applications and sentimental value.

[Uzebox NES Controller via Hack a Day]

IT IS ALIVE, and “I am so excited” in a Jessie Spano sort of way, minus the caffeine pills.  I finally have a house to call my own that is all networked up. For me the HTPC has been the heart and brain of my entire dream system.  The purpose of this project was to take advantage of all the free content on the internet and not have to pay a cable bill.  With programs like Boxee, Hulu, TVersity, and Graboid a person should have no reason to pay for tv.  Save the money on all the channels and up your bandwidth to 16mb+ a second.

HTPC stands for home theater PC, although exactly what is a home theater PC is debatable. Most people agree that a HTPC needs to be connected to some sort of screen, usually a television. But then there are so many wide uses for a HTPC that it is hard to outline all of them.

THE SPECS

Here is a quick breakdown of the specs:

AMD Athlon 64 1.6Ghz

2GB DDR2 Ram

160GB HDD – Preloaded with Microsoft Windows Vista Basic

1TB HDD – Movies and Files

SuperMulti DVD±RW Dual Layer Labelflash

Asus M3N78-VM Motherboard – Socket AM2+, MicroATX, Geforce 8200, Audio, RAID, VGA, DVI, HDMI

500W Power Supply

Apevia X-Master Desktop HTPC Case with Front USB, Firewire, and Audio ports

THE BUILD

I originally bought a refurbished eMachines EL 1200 Desktop from TigerDirect.com ($189.97), but that setup left me with no way of outputting the video onto my screen at a reasonable resolution.  The power supply was only 240W and most video cards require 400W and up.  The case was proprietary and the PSU was too small to be replaced by a larger PSU to meet my requirements.  The next option was to just buy a new case and motherboard ($149.98) that would have HDMI out built onto it.  I gutted out the eMachine and put everything into the new case and onto the new motherboard.  I am not going to sit here and tell you how to put together a computer.  If you don’t know how to build a computer, you have nothing to fear. The grand total for the project was $339.95 minus CA tax, but shipping was free.

THE PROGRAMS

What is Boxee?
Boxee is a free, open-source software platform that integrates personal media with Internet media along with social networking. boxee’s social networking component allows users to share information about what they’re listening to or watching with other Boxee users or friends on social networks like twitter, facebook, etc.

Boxee is designed for your TV and use of a remote control. To get Boxee on your TV you’ll need to first connect your computer to the TV screen. You will most likely need an DVI/VGA to HDMI cable.

What is Hulu?

Hulu is a website that offers commercial-supported streaming video of TV shows and movies from NBC, Fox, ABC and many other networks and studios. Hulu videos are currently offered only to users in the United States. In order to ensure that no international users outside the U.S. have access to the video channel, Hulu has blocked anonymous proxies and virtual private networks. Hulu provides video in Flash Video format, including many films and shows that are available in 360p and 480p.

What is TVersity?

TVersity Media Server is a software package that allows a personal computer to stream content to UPnP devices, such as the Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii, regardless of the limitations of the device. For example, the Xbox 360 does not support certain codecs or Internet videos such as YouTube. TVersity Media Server transcodes the video on the PC into a compatible codec and then streams it to the device.

What is Graboid?

Graboid Video makes it easy to access to the most extensive library of full length videos with over 150,000 videos online, and now you can try it free. Simply Download Graboid Video and create your account.

Conclusion

I went ahead and downloaded all of those programs and viola! a working Home Theater PC.  Some possible future additions to my HTPC will be a Blu-Ray drive, TV Tuner Card (should I pay for cable and want to record it), wireless remote control and keyboard, and multicard reader.

It isn’t a crazy machine. I didn’t opt for the blow your mind type of setup. I wanted a simple machine that would do everything I needed it to do a price I thought was very reasonable.

As far as my HTPC being the heart and brain of my system, I am now able to stream my entire movie and music catalog to every room in my house.   I can also access all my music, videos, and pictures when I am at work or anywhere for that matter.  If a guest is staying over in the extra bedroom they have access to everything and even Netflix, just as if they were in a hotel.

Now I can begin all the other projects associated with this one so stay tuned for the Wiimote HTPC controller, USB and/or Bluetooth NES Controller, USB and/or Bluetooth Sega Controller, HTPC with NES and SEGA emulators, and in-ceiling surround sound speakers that this will be hooked up to.

Have you ever made an HTPC?  What types of things did you add to yours?  If this was your project what would you change?  Any and all comments welcome.

We can all thank Everett Bradford, a student with a wannabe superhero streak, for a project in his mechanisms class. He’s built his own flamethrower, a wrist-mounted one!  To give an arm-directed puff of flame like Pyro from X-Men. As you can see from the video above, it actually works… so a big thanks goes to Everett for breaking my awesome scale. Didn’t his Mom tell him not be careless with fire?

I think it is safe to say that moms around the world will rejoice thanks to Everett’s helpful how-tos. His project is called Prometheus, and it’s by far one of the coolest DIY projects I have ever seen. Now I am even further on my way to becoming a crime stopping super-hero. Although when I am not out fighting crime I will definitely be the center of attention at my next cocktail party. [Prometheus via Make]

Here’s a fantastic project using an arduino, a motor, and a piezo sensor which allows you to both record and detect knocking patterns to unlock a door.  The video below does a fantastic job of demonstrating how it works: It’s completely mobile and can be suction cupped to any dead bolt. Press a button to record a new sequence.  Upon detecting the correct sequence of knocks, the motor turns the lock open.  Brilliant!

Secret Knock Door Lock

Knock Sensor Layout and Parts List

For more details on the project including detailed photos and code, check out the project build.