Hacks: The Craft Camera

The Craft Camera, a DIY Cardboard Camera!
Via: Ufunk

While you’ll find plenty of DIY guides for building film cameras, it’s not the same story for digital.

The Craft Camera aims to solve that issue. It’s a simple DIY digital camera built out of cardboard and a low-cost electronic system from Arduino. The camera stores the images on a memory card that plugs into your computer.

Hacks: DIY Bottle (Crystal) Radio

This simple video will teach you on how you can build a bottle radio, which requires no external power source and will let you hear nearby radio transmissions.

Crystal radio technology has been around for many years. This “bottle radio” take on a crystal radio requires no power source, operates on the power from radio waves, and receives signal from a long wire antenna. As radio stations slowly move away from the AM band, the “window of opportunity” to experience this remarkable technology is dwindling. The “crystal” in question is contained inside a germanium diode, and is used to rectify the radio signal so that our ears can hear it.

Hacks: Stranded Frenchman Builds Bike from Car

Man, stranded in the desert, makes a motorcycle from his broken car

The original story is in French, and the Google translate is very rough. Please forgive us if we don’t get this completely accurate.

While traveling through the desert somewhere in north west Africa in his Citroen 2CV , [Emile] is stopped, and told not to go any further due to some military conflicts in the area. Not wanting to actually listen to this advice, he decides to loop around, through the desert, to circumvent this roadblock.

After a while of treading off the beaten path, [Emile] manages to snap a swing arm on his vehicle, leaving him stranded. He decided that the best course of action was to disassemble his vehicle and construct a motorcycle from the parts. This feat would be impressive on its own, but remember, he’s still in the desert and un-prepared. If we’re reading this correctly, he managed to drill holes by bending metal and sawing at it, then un-bending it to be flat again.
It takes him twelve days to construct this thing. There are more pictures on the site, you simply have to go look at it. Feel free to translate the labels and post them in the comments.
Update: From [Semicolo] in the comments

You got the translation right, but there’s not just a swing arm that’s broken, there’s a frame beam broken too (not sure about the exact term, one of the 2 girder of the chassis). He’s not far away but he has a lot of tools and other hardware that could be stolen if he leaves them unattended.

Via: Reddit
Credit for translation goes to JonhDksn

Hacks: Floppy Disk Autoloader

Floppy disk enthusiast Dweller has been grappling for some time with how to archive his personal collection of 5000 3.5″ floppies. So he built a Floppy Autoloader that automatically copies and photographs a floppy disk in about three minutes. Via: Hack A Day

I had thousands of old floppy disks to read, and it would have taken forever to process them all by hand.

This is the result, a Copypro CP-2000 wired to an arduino, a motor controller, and a kryoflux. Will automatically work its way through a hundred or so disks at a time.