Besmoke - fluid dynamics

Besmoke - Interactive Fluid Simulation with iPhone and Sound Reactivity from eric gradman on Vimeo.
Besmoke is a fluid dynamics engine. It is compatible with any multitouch system, as well as the accelerometer in an iPhone. It also accepts audio input. The audio input can turn it into a fancy music visualizer that would even work with live or acoustic music. Different frequencies cause fluid to be injected from different “emitters”. There’s great info on his page, including the papers that he based this off of. We’ve covered [Eric]’s work before with his election party light system.

Thursday Nano Hacks: Getting Power from your Nano

For this week’s Nano Hack we will cover how to get power off your iPod Nano’s battery. Power can be useful when you need to run other small low power devices in conjunction with the Nano. These devices can be small circuits, lights, etc. In next week’s installment we will use the power we draw to power a glowing sleeve for the iPod Nano.

What you will need:
- an iPod connector cable to cannibalize (we used a Dock Connector to USB 2.0 + FireWire)
- a multimeter
- a soldering iron
- some sort of thin knife or miniature flat head screwdriver to pry open the connector

PIC based iPod remote control

I’d found plenty of documentation on the iPod’s dock pinout and serial based remote interface, but never a decent explanation of how to actually implement it. Finally I found BigCookie’s iPod to T&A remote control adapter tucked away in the iPod Linux wiki. He built the controller to receive remote signals from his T&A audio receiver and then translate them to control the iPod. He’s got schematics and code for a a PIC16F628 microcontroller. I’m guessing the code could be adapted to support almost any input method the PIC supports.

iPod hd adapter

Robert Brown sent in his iPod hd adapter. Sure, you could buy an Addonics 1.8″ toshiba to ide adapter for $15; but he didn’t mind soldering up the 50 wires to connect his drive to a USB IDE adapter. To finish it out, he put everything into an enclosure and added an eject button.

Solar backpack ipod/usb charger

Jason sent me his solar ipod charger how-to. The regulator may not be neccesary - but there are so many models, I don’t know if the new Nano’s hold up to the old power input standard. He put a 7805 regulator on a 6v 100ma flexible panel that he mounted on his backpack. I’ve seen this sort of thing on a shuffle before, but this one should work for most iPods. USB power management sometimes shoots itself in the foot, but iPods are willing to pull power if it’s not present. It’s nice, clean and simple. I’d consider adding some high temp hot glue (or epoxy)to keep the soldered connections from breaking.

Nike iPod hacking

Someone else’s apathy often becomes someones motivation. The guys at Gordian Labs got sick of trying to use Nike’s website so they dug into their iPods to find the data generated by the iPod+Nike running shoe add on. Then they put together a handy site for processing the data from the iPod. The site also accepts GPX data, so you can combine it with GPS data to track your runs and your routes. After they showed it to me, I prodded them and they put together a short How-To on getting the data under Mac, Windows and Linux.