Mac powered drill

I have a very nice Bosch power drill, but that spends most of it time in the Munich Maker Lab as of late, and I needed one for a project asap.

I had a crappy one with a broken battery, and I had an old Macbook battery with one broken cell. So I did the obvious thing, I ripped the working cells out of the MB battery (in which everything was glued together *grrrr*), assembled a 3S lipo pack compatible with my rc lipo charger and transplanted that into the old battery box.

Up-cycling headphones

I needed new bluetooth headphones as my old Nokias started to fall apart. 

Seeing old analog wireless headphones in the free-for-all bin in the Munich Maker Lab I looked around for a easy solution to enable them with bluetooth. 

I found the OVC3860 module (5$) which integrates an bluetooth module with HiFi and headset profiles, an headphone amp, lipo loader and even has some pins for easily attachable buttons. 

I've put the module in one side and an old 370mAh lipo with an separate charger in the other. 

Features added: 

- 3 buttons on the side to control Play/Pause, Next, Previous

- NFC sticker to setup up the bluetooth connection 

- Audio port usable as a line out (with volume turn low) or speaker in (with audio module off)

Total cost of the project: around 10€

New insights in my mobile

I have a Sony Xperia Z which I was very happy with until recently.

First, an Firmware update destroyed the battery runtime, then another one fixed this, but the phone was laggy as hell THEN the lens permanently fogged up from the inside with dust (this phone is waterproof, how did that happen??).

I was close to buy the new MotoX, but decided to follow the Self-Repair Manifesto and 'own' this phone. First I installed Cyanogen Mod to make it fast and stable again, then I fixed the lens fogging. I had concerns about that as everything is glued together but it was really easy. You only need a hot air gun and a suction cup.

Anyway, I tried how easy it is to remove the black coating of the back glass... you see the result below. =)


The mainboard was covered by the NFC antenna, so I moved that over the battery.

Un-crap tripod

My girl bought me a Manfrotto 785B over 8 years ago. I liked it because its really light but was stable enough to mount my Panasonic FZ-8 and later my E-P1. That said, it was still ok to use with the E-M5 but I used it a lot with that camera and this showed at the head which couldn't be fixed down properly anymore. 

Original

Being one of the cheaper Manfrotto tripods the head is not swappable, only replaceable with the same one. Nevertheless I wanted to upgrade to a better head and found the Manfrotto 494RC2 with mounting plate which is easily big enough to hold my E-M1 with 50-200 SWD (~2kg). 

Modded

I removed the old head and used Plaast (hand-formable thermoplast like Fantastic Plastic) to form an end cap to protect the old thread. After it hardened it was easily unscrewable, so I can mount the old head again.   

Then I turned the lower part of the center post around, unscrewed the original end cap, wrapped an 3/8 inch screw in Plaast and slowly screwed the still soft material in the thread. I fixed the screw down while the stuff was hardening and was already done.

A bit of way on the center post was lost, everything else is great. =)

Motorola Droid 4 in original Atrix LapDock

 I was always a big fan of the Motorola LapDock. The concept of having a smartphone with so much resources that it can be used like a laptop is awesome. I really think that will be the future.

Think about it.

In your pocket: A kick ass smart phone with all your data and accounts. Insert it into the lapdock (which can be super sleek and light due to being just a screen and keyboard with a big battery) and you have a Android based Laptop (Future: chromebook).

Who needs a normal laptop anymore?

Anyway, Motorola was first to implement this and sold this thing, the sleek all aluminum 11'' Motorola LapDock, only usable with the Motorola Atrix. After that one they shipped two newer models which could be used with most of Motorolas other Android handsets, but this one is the best designed.

I got one cheap on ebay (65€) and as you can see on the right picture, that is no Motorola Atrix in there, that is my Motorola Droid 4.

That was made possible through a tiny hardware hack. All that is needed to do is turning the mini HDMI and micro usb ports inside the docking cradle. All in all maybe 30 minutes work. Some trimming was necessary to turn the connectors around.  I don't know why they didn't ship it that way in the first place, everything works out of the box (except volume control if using the speakers in the dock ... which are worse than the one in the phone).

I don't know if I will use that thing much. Its pretty light, thats a plus. Decent keyboard too. I bought it for my Rasberry Pi in the first place but got the idea the moment I had it in my hands.

 Some more proof in the picture to the left.

It's sad that Motorola is leaving the whole LapDock idea behind. The newest phones come without support for the docks. I really believe that this is the future. Smartphones are so fast already, in 5-7 years time most people will need nothing else but their phone and something to give the interface more room.

Some further reading