Droid Dock 30 bucks (Ya Right!) DYI

So I now have a new cell phone, this one is a Motorola Droid by the way (way cool!). I guess you can get a car mount and a home docking station for ($29.99) each. When you put the droid in the home docking station it goes into media mode and when you put it in the car mount it goes into nav mode. Now true you can use apps to turn on these modes but you have to push buttons! God forbid we have to do work! Plus $60 bucks come on. Well you know me DYI.








So I guess how it changes modes is with magnets how fun is that!






I wasn't sure how to approach this I wanted to do it in metal because I'm a better metal worker then a wood worker. Since I wanted to test the concept fast I used some scrap trim that I had sitting around. The magnet came out of an old CD drive





You have to kinda play with the position of the magnets because there two magnetic switch's in the phone one for the car nav mode and one for the home media mode. I think should incorporate power and speakers next, that will be (DYI Dock 2.0) coming soon to a blog near you!

What to do with one Old Cool Fork.

More fun with metal but the sad part is no fire for this project. So what can you do with a Old Cool Fork. Well you can make a Cool Business Card holder or a table place card holder.

This is a easy project for a quick present for someone or quick cash if you just sell them to other people. To make them you need a vice a tack hammer or any small hammer will do and a pair of needle nose pliers. The vice and hammer is for the neat 90 degree bends on the front and the needle nose pliers are for the loops on the back. A good place to find forks is the good will store or garage sales.

DYI Engine Generator First Steps

So I decided to take another step towards energy independence and once again it had to be DYI! I found an article in hompower magazine #42 on how to make a 12 volt engine generator. So the basic idea of of this thing is to have a small lawn mower engine a car alternator and some sort of field controller to control the 12 volt output from the alternator. Where to start? well I figure I would start with the controller first.



My long term plan is to build a small solar system you know the type with panels not planets I'll work my way up to planets later. Anyway I'm starting with the controller because I figure that I have one deep cycle battery now for my backup power for my radios, and I use a AC trickle charger to keep it topped off. So if the power ever goes out I only have the small VW solar panel to trickle charge it. So I figure if I build the charge controller first I could use it in an emergency by just hooking it up to my cars alternator. Also doing it this way I able to take my time looking for an engine and an alternator and maybe I can get it for my favorite price free.