FreeDVDBoot Opens Up The PlayStation 2 Like Never Before

For many generations, home consoles have featured copy protection. Aiming to stop users from playing pirated games as well as running homebrew code, hackers often race to find vulnerabilities shortly after each new launch. Of course, finding workarounds can sometimes be more of a marathon than a sprint. [Grifter]’s new …read more

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Tiny Laser Cutter Puts Micro Steppers to Work

The influx of cheap laser cutters from China has been a boon to the maker movement, if at the cost of a lot of tinkering to just get the thing to work. So some people just prefer to roll their own, figuring that starting from scratch means you get exactly …read more

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A Truly Classy Metal-Framed Mini CNC

We’ve seen a number of DVD- and CDROM-based small CNC machines here, but few are as simply beautiful as this one by [julioberaldi] over on Instructables (translated from Portuguese here).

We’ll cut to the chase; it’s the frame. Cut from steel sheet scraps with a hacksaw, and welded or soldered together with “bar solder”. It looks like a lot of sanding, painting, and polishing went on. The result is something we’d be proud to have on our desk.

For now, it simply draws with a pen. But watch the video, embedded below, and you’ll see that it runs exceptionally smoothly. …read more

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A Low-Cost Mini PCB Printer

The next great advancement in homebrew electronics is an easy way to turn copper clad board into functional circuit boards. This has been done since the 60s with etch resist pens, sheets of etch resist rub-on transfers, the ever-popular photocopy and clothes iron, and now with small CNC mills. It’s still a messy, slow, and expensive process. [johnowhitaker] and [esot.eric] are trying to solve the latter of these problems with a mini PCB printer made out of DVD drives.

Playing around with the guts of a DVD drive is something [john] and [eric] have been doing for a while now, …read more

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