ChaosProjects.com

I guess I’m one of the lucky ones who have several 2,5″ HDD laying around without a box - thereby rendering them somewhat useless. I went down to the local computer pusher to buy a suitable case (with both Firewire & USB2 of course).

I found a case that met my demands - however it was rather hideous, and being a Mac-guy and all, I knew something had to change… So what to do? Paint it? Hmm nope… Painting plastic and aluminum usually leaves a result worse than what I started with…

So I thought “Hey… Let’s wrap it to go with the new OSX”.

Tadaaaa! A furry OSX Leopard ready portable harddrive.

Inspired by the motion picture “The Jackal”, where Bruce Willis built a mean-ass automated gun (aka turret, aka sentry gun), I have always wanted to build something similar myself.

One of the hurdles I had to overcome was to automate the trigger… Iv’e tried loads of different solutions including electromagnets or weird solutions with strings and a rotary motor.

A major goal in this process is finding a way to get a rapid linear pull when flipping a switch upon which the “finger” should return to its original position… Ready for the next pull…

For some reason I’ve always wanted a video camera with a huge amount of zoom.
Why..? Well. For no good reason at all. I just did. That drew me to build the zoom converter..

This strange setup gave me a good idea about the aprox distance between the cam & the lens.

A little theory:
One of the major issues to get at good picture is the optic the light has to pass through, before it hits the LCD, CMOS etc.
And the cheapest way to get a quality lens and with the most amount of zoom, is by using your standard 35mm SLR optics of any brand. Even a lot of the cheapest ones will do. ( a standard 70-300mm costs aprox 160$). These optics are the ones with the biggest market share and there fore the cheapest and easiest to get.