If for some strange reason you don’t know of Benjamin Heckendorn  (Ben Heck), he’s the king of hacking and modding, a console modder extraordinaire who turns consoles into laptops, and just about any gaming related hack you could possibly think of.  You can view all of his projects around HacknMod and by checking out his site, Gizmodo and Engadget.

Don’t Miss:

• How to Make a Portable Gaming Console
• 3 Ways to Install a Game Console in your Car

Some of his laptops are pictured above and below.  A the top of the page is an interview with Ben and a brief walk through of his household lab.  We definitely agree that tinkering with electronics is an extraordinary hobby and a fantastic way to make a living too

By the way, Hack N Mod is teaming up with Ben Heck for a super secret project to be announced later this year! More details to come – subscribe for free to stay posted.

Here’s another fantastic tutorial from Jay, a DIY lasers expert. See all of our DIY Laser Projects. I modified this very nice Stainless Steel flashlight into a 50mW green laser. It is very heavy duty, and super small.  Below, I will show the modifications that have been made to the host and module.

Important: This is a class 3B laser and should be used with care. Proper eye protection for 532nm wavelength recommended. It can instantly damage the eye if it is pointed directly into the eye. Even reflections can cause eye damage.

• Stainless Steel UltraFire C3 host
• 50mW Green Module
• CR2 batteries

Here are the pictures that show the modifications:

These are all the basic parts you really need for the project. It’s a super simple setup really, just the laser module, the battery, and housing. That’s it!

The only major modification we have to make is to simply shorten the barrel of the laser.  A simple mod to get everything to fit in our steel housing.

Final Results:

It is a very heavy and solid design with good heatsinking for the module. This design offers the option of using CR2 primaries, or RCR2 rechargeable batteries. I am using a CR2 primary and am very happy with the results, so I will not need to push the module with the slightly higher voltage that the rechargeable battery has.

More Exceptional Laser Projects:

• Powerful Blu-Ray Laser on a Keychain
• Fantastic DIY 7 Color Laser Tutorial
• Mindblowing LED, Light and Laser Photography

1. Makeownringtone.com. With this site you have a variety of options when it comes to uploadable formats. You can choose from MP3, MP4, QCP, OGG, AAC, and MMF.
2. Audiko.net. This is one of the most popular services for creating your own ringtone. Upload your song, take the excerpt that you want to act as your ringtone, and start the download process.
3. Mobicious.com. By offering a free service, Mobicious.com has a leg up on the competition. All you have to do is upload your MP3, clip the portion that you want to use, and turn it into a ringtone that can be instantly sent to your cell phone.

Once you find a service you enjoy, you can create as many ringtones as you want while being assured that each one is 100 percent unique. If you want to learn to edit MP3, wav and other audio files, use audacity to create custom ringtones.

• Don’t miss: 10 Fantastic Dark Knight Mods

More Batman and Car Projects:

• DIY Dark Knight USB Spotlight
• Make Rotating Bookshelves, Staircases, and Trapdoors
• ‘78 Corvette turned into a Batmobile

School is back in session shortly for most college students.  While you could be an average Joe and and buy all your back to school goods, you’ll be far better off building your own DIY projects to pimp your bland dorm room.  These fantastic tutorials will walk you through creating custom, outstanding dorm rooms to show off your DIY skill.

Incredible Lighting:

1. The Emergency Party Button will help make friends quickly.
2. How to Display Audio as Light (Make LEDs Flash to Music)
3. Make Custom RGB Mood Lights
4. DIY Abilight for your PC, TV and more
5. Need more inspiration? See all of our LED and Light projects.

DIY Security:

1. How to Use RFID to Protect your Beer, Valuables
2. DIY Motion Sensing Laptop Security Cam
3. Build your own Laser Security System
4. RFID Door Lock Mechanism
5. All of our security projects

Save Money:

1. DIY Continuous Ink Printer = Unlimited Free Printing
2. Get Free Internet by Making a Wifi Repeater
3. Build Your Own Open-Source DVR

Gaming Hacks:

1. Rapid Fire Mods Make you the Halo King
2. Burn copies of PS3, Wii, and Xbox 360
3. Play all your favorite NES games online, and emulate the Wii and other consoles.
4. Select a console from the categories on the right for more.

Custom Transport:

1. For the outgoing types:  Setup and make your own custom transportation like the Enicycle and iShoes.
2. Video Tutorial: Build your own Self-Balancing Segway
3. Build a Speedy Motorized Shopping Cart

DIY Entertainment:

1. Make your own HD Projector (another version)
2. Stylish High Quality DIY iPod and iPhone Speakers
3. Stream any Video to your PS3, Xbox 360, or Wii
4. DIY Wireless Music Remote

Extra Awesome!

If you’re ready to go all out and stand out you need to go the extra mile:

• Beer Launching Fridge
• iPhone Controlled USB Missile Launcher
• Shut Down your PC with a Cell Phone

Helpful Tips:

1. Hack College always has plenty of great tips to help you survive the year.
2. Check out this fantastic dorm layout and use of space for inspiration
3. Put all those extra beer bottles to good use. (another option)
4. Access your PC from Anywhere on Campus for Free

As always, be sure to subscribe for free to receive our hacks for daily.  Be sure to send in your projects and earn cash too!

Mother nature provides us with countless ways to produce our electricity. The tricky part is harnessing it. Learn how to install solar panels and wind turbines to generate all the electricity you’ll ever need.  Also, check out our energy efficient 110v LED light bulbs.

DIY Wind Power Tutorials:

• GotWind.org is probably your best bet. It’s loaded with useful information to guide you.
• Another fantastic resource to help you is wind power generation.
• To start small, start out with some science fair level projects.
• Ready to move on? Try a dirt simple turbine.
• After that, move up and build your own backyard turbine.
• Canada even published a lengthy article on how to build a turbine.

  

DIY Solar Power Tutorials:

• Build it Solar has plenty of great information to help get you started.
• Before you build, be sure to ask yourself some of these important questions.
• Next, check out this detailed tutorial for an example of the steps you’ll be taking.
• For a far more simple project, learn to generate free heat using pop cans and plexiglass.

If you’re craving even more info, see our DIY Free Electricity section. Need solar panels? We’ve got dirt cheap prices at the HacknMod store. Join the thousands of satisfied DIYers today!

More DIY Free Energy Tutorials:

• How to DIY Solar Panel Installation
• Free Electricity? Yep – Build your own Wind Turbine
• Next Gen Wind Energy you have Never Seen
• Put Wind Powered Wifi on your Roof

The starting point for the self rigged 1080p HD projector is a 120V S15 Mega-Kit from Lumenlab. The Lumenlab kit gives a leg up with all the different components for the projector setup. The kit includes:

• S15 Projection Lens Triplet to focus the light.
• Fresnel lens to shape the reflected light
• LL/Vue 400w eBallast powering the 400W 6500K bulb.

The Lumenlab store is also a good place to shop around for a compatible LCD flat panel monitor that will support the high definition projections at that resolution. Save a ton of bother by buying one which will be let you enjoy high end image formats like Blu-Ray.

A high-def projector is a precision gadget. Exact specifications for the design may really make or break the project. This is where Lumenlab’s DIY Projector Guide and the Projector Builder section of the Lumenlab Forum lend their know-how. The DIY HD projector may seem like a hi-tech challenge, but with the starter help of the video, Lumenlab’s kit and forum, it’s worth the work.

Follow some of our previous posts that help you design your entertainment:

• Full DIY Home Theater Build: Start to Finish
• Build your own Movie Server
• DIY Stadium Seating for the Super Bowl

Keep in mind, this room was pitch black a moment ago. Here’s another fantastic tutorial from Jay, a DIY lasers expert. See all of our DIY LED and Laser Projects.

Take an ordinary, boring LED keychain and turn it into a super powered LED as bright as a flashlight. For a very bright Key Chain LED flashlight, I modified the ‘Task Force’ key chain light from Lowe’s using a Q5 emitter, and a 200mAh capacity 10280 Lithium rechargeable battery. I also modified the light with an aluminum reflector and glass lens to give it some nice ‘throw.’

• Cree light that I used for parts
• Q5 emitter
• Batteries
  
• This charger works well for these batteries

The Build:

Modifying a clicky switch and circuit:

The 12mm clicky switch has to be ‘trimmed’ or sanded on the edges and corners to fit the tiny host as shown in these pictures…

Modifying a reflector and glass lens:

I machined to size the reflector, and re-sized the glass lens from the Cree light that I linked above…

Of course, I had to trim the emitter to size, and make a custom heatsink as well. The emitter is glued to the custom heatsink with thermal adhesive.

Final Results:

The Key Chain light is very bright now! Using a 200mAh capacity lithium battery, with a 332mA battery current draw, I would expect about 45 minutes between charges. Hope you enjoyed my Key Chain LED flashlight modification! – Jay

This post was submitted by a Hack N Mod fan, just like yourself. If you’d like to earn money from your projects, feel free to contact us.

Related Posts:

• Powerful Blu-Ray Laser on a Keychain
• Incredible Coil Gun with LEDs and Lasers
• Our entire collection of LED projects
  

Here’s another fantastic tutorial from our Open Source Arduino master, Matt. See all of our Arduino projects.

In the spirit of the open source gameboy (#5 on the Top 40 Arduino Projects of the Web), Matt’s latest project uses a few Arduino shields to make the Open Source “PSP” with two-player ping-pong. Since the PSP has dual controllers mounted on either side of a screen, the Open Source PSP project also has two sets of controllers linked to a central touchscreen.

The TripleWide Extendershield from Liquidware replicates the Arduino pins in three places, so three shields can be physically connected to and controlled by a single Arduino board. Two InputShields are used in left and right hand configurations for  joystick-controllers, and the TouchShield Slide an Arduino OLED-touchscreen shield used for the display. All three are placed on top of the TripleWide, and an Arduino board (in this case the Duemilanove) is placed underneath, as shown in the chalkboard drawing below:

Assembling the hardware, in this case, is quite straightforward.  Snap the Arduino on to the center slot of the TripleWide like this:

Flip the TripleWide over, then place the InputShields (one “left-handed” and one “right-handed”) on the outer slots, and the TouchShield Slide on the central slot. The finished gadget should look like this:

For a refresher on getting started with the Arduino, the HackNMod introduction to the Arduino will probably come in handy. You can get all the parts in a kit if you’d like and the source code for two-player ping-pong on the Open Source PSP.  The source code is packaged into a single file with everything needed to program each of the modules in this project. The Antipasto Arduino IDE to run the file can be downloaded here, along with more instructions. Then you’re ready to challenge a friend to some handheld, open source, Arduino ping-pong!

This post was submitted by a Hack N Mod fan, just like yourself. If you’d like to earn money from your projects, feel free to contact us.

Here’s another fantastic tutorial from Jay, a DIY lasers expert. See all of our DIY Laser Projects.

I finally finished my 7 color laser! For the guts of the project, I followed this great Laser tutorial on HacknMod. (by rog8811)

For the housing, I decided to go with a clear enclosure using ‘push on / push off’ clicky buttons. (I needed something with room for my build, which has heatsinks on all of the lasers – still pretty small though) The polycarbonate material is scratch resistant. It’s cool to be able to see inside the assembly of the three lasers and sled!

Important: This is a class 3B laser and should be used with care. Proper eye protection is recommended. It can instantly damage the eye if it is pointed directly into the eye. Even reflections can cause eye damage.

Parts:

• Translucent polycarbonate enclosure
• Adjustable sled mount/heatsinks – Must have!
• 405-G-1 glas lens modification for blu-ray
• FlexDrive
• Green Modules

I just went for the 7 color laser, not the spiro. How Rog gets all of that to fit into his small box is beyond me. I thought I would share just a couple of things I found out doing this build. First, the pictures:

The Build:

I found out that this project is much more difficult than I had anticipated. Rog makes this kind of thing look easy, but it is very difficult to get all 3 lasers lined up perfectly!

Power Settings and Diodes:
I stayed pretty close to the recommendations by rog8811 from the tutorial linked above. Here are my settings…

• Red – Sony/Senkat – 92mA’s (measured 42mW’s with AixiZ acrylic back opened)
• Blu-ray – PHR – 118mA’s (measured 110mW’s with AixiZ acrylic back opened)
• O-like 10mW green – I picked the best one I had, which measured 9mW’s with a CR123.
• You lose a lot through the optics in the sled. And it must also depend on the color of the laser, as to how much of it reflects off of the coatings on the PS3 turning mirror.
• The Red started out at 42mW’s, and comes out at 26mW’s.
• The blu-ray started out at 110mW’s and comes out at only 20mW’s.
• The green started out at 9mW’s and comes out at 4mW’s.
• Now just do the math for the ‘in-between’ colors! (yes, I tested them)

* Turquoise – 24mW’s

* Yellow – 30mW’s

* Magenta – 46mW’s

* White – 50mW’s

Notes:

• I bounced the dots off a mirror in the other room so that on the ’round trip’, the dots would be close to me. That way I could see if they were aligned. Because you want them to align at distance.
• Also, they must be aligned at the aperture as well! This is easy for the red and blu-ray, because they are pointed at the splitter cube, but check for this when setting up your green, which must meet the other beams through the PS3 turning mirror.
• I went with a little thread lock on the lens threads at both the focus ring, and the module. (get perfect focus before it dries)

I did this because the assembly needs to be so precisely aligned, that even the smallest movement can put the dots out of alignment at distance. Anyway, this is the coolest project I have done yet!

There is a kit available for adjustable sled mount/heatsinks that is a MUST HAVE for this build. Updated and more powerful version. (358mW’s) Good build tips!

Final Results:

(Beam shots – with some smoke)

The alignment is definitely the key to the build, and is the most difficult part. Above, I mentioned a couple of things that I found useful for helping with this, but no matter what, it will be a chore to get it perfect. Very happy with these results! Thanks to rog8811 and Hack N Mod for showing his laser tutorial for the guts of this great project! – Jay

This post was submitted by a Hack N Mod fan, just like yourself. If you’d like to earn money from your projects, feel free to contact us.

Related Posts:

• Powerful Blu-Ray Laser on a Keychain
• Incredible Coil Gun with LEDs and Lasers
• Our entire collection of outstanding laser builds