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Starfish PBX goes public

Posted: August 31st, 2009, 5:00pm MDT by Mike Szczys

Starfish PBX takes the very popular Asterisk telephony platform and adds an open source, fully functional web management interface. Asterisk allows you to be your own private branch exchange; think of it as your own telephone company. You can setup extensions in your home or office, configure an intercom system, implement a hold system with [...]

Update: Foundation PC Cooling

Posted: August 31st, 2009, 4:30pm MDT by James Munns

[gigs], whose foundation-based PC cooling project we covered earlier, has posted his initial test results. There was a large debate going back and forth in the comments as to whether or not this would work, and hopefully this should clear most of it up. He used a 150W fish tank heater to simulated his system’s [...]

Hacking the smart tweezers

Posted: August 31st, 2009, 4:00pm MDT by Caleb Kraft

These Smart Tweezers are pretty cool tools for anyone doing SMD components. We tried them out and found them very pleasant well made. They are able to identify components and take readings easily with one hand. One thing they are missing, however, is the ability to measure voltage. The people over at Openschemes decided to [...]

Custom cable management

Posted: August 31st, 2009, 3:00pm MDT by Jakob Griffith

You would be hard pressed to find a hacker who doesn’t have in some form a rats nest of wires and cables behind their computer desk. [Antoine] decided to tackle the problem and came up with his custom built cable management system. There is little info, but he does say his setup uses Ikea Antonius [...]

I-Swarm robot update

Posted: August 31st, 2009, 2:21pm MDT by Mike Szczys

Back in October we reported on the I-Swarm robotics project. [Travis] sent us some more information. These tiny robots are programmed optically and are able to respond to programming commands via an infrared signal. Locomotion is facilitated with piezoelectric actuators and the power to the units provided through a solar cell. It is not clear [...]

Internet enabled Furby

Posted: August 31st, 2009, 1:19pm MDT by Mike Szczys

[edwindertien] sent us his project to connect a Furby to the internet. The original Furby controller was replaced with an Arduino which in turn was given ethernet connectivity via a LANTRONIX XPort serial ethernet module. This assigns the Furby an IP address which can then be accessed through a script or via a web interface. [...]

Gameboy foot controller

Posted: August 31st, 2009, 8:11am MDT by Caleb Kraft

[Joey] sent us a link to the newest version of his Gameboy foot controller. In the video above, you can see how he uses it to control the loops in the background while he plays his guitar through an 8-bit filter. That is an old video, using the previous version. He tells us that several [...]

Cheap wireless for microcontrollers

Posted: August 30th, 2009, 9:29pm MDT by Jakob Griffith

Everybody loves microcontrollers, including the Arduino, allowing you to create whatever you imagine. That is unless you want to hack together something wireless. Originally you had to rely on the expensive XBee protocol or other wireless options, but no longer. Hobby Robotics found an extremely cheap transmitter and receiver and wrote a quick guide for [...]

Lego iPod hacking robot

Posted: August 30th, 2009, 4:53pm MDT by Zach Banks

The Linux4nano project has been working to port the Linux kernel onto the iPod Nano along with other iPods in general. Although the iPodLinux project has had luck with some older iPods, newer models protect firmware updates with encryption. One of the ways they plan on running code on the device is through a vulnerability [...]

Your music in Rock Band 2

Posted: August 30th, 2009, 10:01am MDT by Mike Szczys

[Peter Kirn] over at Create Digital Music takes an in depth look at the process of adding your own music to Rock Band 2. This involves using REAPER audio production software, uploading your work via the XNA Creators’ Club, and then playing the fresh track on an Xbox 360. Both REAPER and the XNA Club [...]

Bokode, a new barcode

Posted: August 29th, 2009, 8:09pm MDT by Jakob Griffith

The MIT Camera Culture Group utilized Bokeh, an effect where the lens is purposely placed out of focus, in order to vastly improve current 2D barcode technology. Dubbed Bokode, the team claims that an off the shelf camera can read data 2.5 microns from a distance of over 4 meters, compared to today’s average barcode [...]

C64 Visual Debugger

Posted: August 29th, 2009, 3:31pm MDT by James Munns

Root Labs wrote about ICU64, a Commodore 64 emulator with a couple unusual features. The most special of these is the ability to show the entire working RAM of the system. Each RAM address lights up when accessed. The user can also zoom in or change the values at each address if they want. This sounds complicated, [...]

Ubuntu developer week

Posted: August 29th, 2009, 1:30pm MDT by Mike Szczys

Next week, August 31 through September 4, is Ubuntu Developer Week. If you’ve always wanted to help out with an open source project but didn’t know how to get into it, this is your chance. The week consists of 25 one-hour sessions held interactively through IRC and led by some of the best of the [...]

Center brake light LED retrofit

Posted: August 29th, 2009, 12:18pm MDT by Mike Szczys

[Matt] wanted to increase the intensity of the center brake light on his car. The factory installed light uses a 20w incandescent bulb and although aftermarket LED replacements are available, he decided to take the retrofit on himself. Using the Fresnel lens from the light assembly as protoboard, he mounted a row of 10mm LEDs [...]

Ms. Pac-Man iPod charging cover

Posted: August 28th, 2009, 7:30pm MDT by Jakob Griffith

iPod chargers definitely are a unique entity on anyone’s desk. Allowing you to stand your iPod upright, charge, and maybe play a video at the same time, but they aren’t exactly beautiful. [russm313] got the brilliant idea of disguising his iPod (and charger) as a miniature Ms. Pac-Man arcade cabinet. Unlike some other small cabinets [...]

Beef up your UPS

Posted: August 28th, 2009, 7:10pm MDT by Mike Szczys

[Surferdude] was unhappy with the decreasing life of his aging uninterruptible power supply. He decided to beef it up using marine batteries. He extended the battery connections outside of the UPS case using #10 wire and swapped the two 12 volt gel cells with the heavy duty lead-acid batteries. Doing so upgraded the device from [...]

XMPP and home automation

Posted: August 28th, 2009, 6:45pm MDT by Matt Schultz

[Matthias] from Intuity Media Lab put together a nice bit on controlling office lights with XMPP from his Android phone. In the article, he explains the components involved in the project, why he chose XMPP, and lists everything you need to replicate it. The project makes use of a wide variety of tools and libraries, [...]

Wireless electricity

Posted: August 28th, 2009, 6:15pm MDT by Mike Szczys

[Eric Giler] has a talk available over at TED that discusses and demos delivering electricity without wires. Called WiTricity, these methods were developed by a team at MIT a few years ago who were working off of the concepts of Nicolai Tesla. The facts shared about our current energy delivery system are a bit shocking; [...]

Tiny light-seeking robots

Posted: August 28th, 2009, 5:45pm MDT by Mike Szczys

[Alex] continues to delight us with his projects. His third-generation tiny Braitenberg vehicle, a light seeking robot, is a big improvement over its predecessor, the mini Braitenberg vehicle. He’s moved from an Arduino based design to using the AVR ATtiny25v, replaced the breadboard with a PCB, and reduced the parts count. We think it was [...]

Apple TV with Boxee and more update

Posted: August 28th, 2009, 5:15pm MDT by Mike Szczys

In November, we covered installing Boxee on AppleTV using atv-usb-creator. [Danny] has written a tutorial on installing Boxee, XBMC, NitoTV, SSH access, and external USB hard drive support. His method installs most of the software via the USB patch stick, then uses the SSH support to enable the external drive and install NitoTV. The tutorial [...]

XR-NOISE Box

Posted: August 28th, 2009, 4:50pm MDT by James Munns

[denha] has assembled a noise box he calls the XR-NOISE using an XR-2206 multi-waveform function generator. The output has an impressive number of controllable settings, and uses a set of LEDs to indicate sound level and rate. The XR-NOISE uses 1/4″ jacks for both in and out, and can also be controlled by the tap-sensitive [...]

Tradewars 2002 lives

Posted: August 28th, 2009, 4:24pm MDT by Mike Szczys

Are you growing tired of playing all those high-framerate first person shooters? Perhaps you long for the days of blocky graphics and text-based play. You’re in luck because Tradewars 2002 is still around. Many of you will remember this 1980’s BBS based game, playing a limited number of turns per day in an effort to [...]

Arduino + Augmented reality

Posted: August 28th, 2009, 9:29am MDT by Caleb Kraft

In this video you can see the marriage of Arduino data collecting units and Augmented reality systems. Set up by the people at pachube.com, a site for sharing sensor information from your location, this is an interesting idea. We can see that each unit has its own pattern, so it can have the data it [...]

USB gameboy cart

Posted: August 28th, 2009, 8:32am MDT by Zach Banks

[Jose Torres] sent in his latest attempt at creating a custom Gameboy game cartridge. We’ve featured his projects before, and he’s come a lot closer over the last 2 years. He’s aiming to create an easy interface for homebrewers that doesn’t require any other special equipment. In this revision, he’s using a PIC and a [...]

Push potentiometer from spares

Posted: August 28th, 2009, 7:28am MDT by Caleb Kraft

In an effort to simplify his interface, [danwagoner] cobbled together this push potentiometer. It utilizes a potentiometer mounted directly above a push button with a spring mounted around it. This way the user has only one item to deal with. They can twist the knob and press down on it to push the button. We [...]

Energy efficient fridge hack

Posted: August 27th, 2009, 6:35pm MDT by James Munns

We’ve already covered a pipe bomb mini-fridge this week, but inventor [Tom Chalko] provides us with today’s fridge hack. He noticed that chest-style (laying down, see above) freezers were more energy efficient when compared to normal stand up refrigerators at the same size, despite the colder temperatures involved. This is largely due to the fact that these chest-style [...]

Vonage on iPhone

Posted: August 27th, 2009, 4:31pm MDT by James Munns

Vonage has promised to release an official iPhone app to compete with other providers such as Skype, and it is currently working its way through Apple’s well documented approval process. Unfortunately, this app would most likely come with an initial cost and/or subscription fee, though a way has been figured out to retrieve Vonage’s SIP authentication [...]

Simple, low-tech attack on Credit Unions

Posted: August 27th, 2009, 3:30pm MDT by Brett Haddock

The National Credit Union Administration is warning all Credit Unions about malicious hackers and a low tech attack by mailing branches CDs with malware on them. Using a somewhat dated but still effective Social Engineering attack, a package designed to look as though it was mailed by the NCUA is sent to the branch. The package [...]

Phasma insectoid

Posted: August 27th, 2009, 2:40pm MDT by Caleb Kraft

When we saw the video of the Phasma insectoid robot above, we immediately thought of the iSprawl. After checking out their site, it turns out that the two are connected in some way, we’re not sure how, maybe just inspiration. The Phasma gives us a little more insight into the construction of the bot. The [...]

DIY 3D gets a nod at SIGGRAPH

Posted: August 27th, 2009, 2:00pm MDT by Phil Burgess

Among the courses at this year’s SIGGRAPH (an annual technical conference and showcase of the latest in computer graphics research) was an introduction to 3D scanning that covers all the bases: mathematical foundations, two different build-your-own hardware approaches, and how to process and render the resulting datasets. The presenters have assembled all the course materials on a [...]

Interfacing a digital rotary switch

Posted: August 27th, 2009, 1:31pm MDT by Mike Szczys

[hw640] has put together a well written and detail packed explanation of how to interface with a digital rotary switch. These digital opto encoders have just two outputs with four possible logic levels (00, 10, 11, 01). The relative position of the switch is insignificant but the direction of rotation is what matters. The short and [...]

Ubuntu repository crash-course

Posted: August 27th, 2009, 12:45pm MDT by Mike Szczys

[Alan] has just posted an Ubuntu screencast that will take you through a crash course in the Ubuntu repositories. If you are new to Ubuntu this will give you a much better grasp on how software repositories are handled. The different types of updates are discussed: Security updates fix bugs that cause a system vulnerability. Updates [...]

Bus Pirate updates: preorder 2 and v3

Posted: August 27th, 2009, 12:00pm MDT by Mike Szczys

We’ve had a barrage of questions regarding when the second preorder of the Bus Pirate would ship. As you know, shipment was delayed by a shortage of PIC processors. [Ian] let us know this morning that the chips have arrived at Seeed Studio, manufacture has begun, and we should see shipments going out within a [...]

Fedora rawhide nightly builds

Posted: August 27th, 2009, 11:19am MDT by Mike Szczys

The devs over at the Fedora Project are hard at work on the development version: Rawhide. They’ve just setup automated nightly builds of the liveCD which can easily be downloaded and tested on a CD, DVD, USB drive, virtual machine, or separate partition. Rawhide will be released as Fedora 12 upon completion. With this version you [...]

Bliplace LED toy

Posted: August 27th, 2009, 9:30am MDT by Caleb Kraft

These wearable LED toys called Bliplace are freshly made and headed to Burning Man. They’re pretty much just a sound reactive toy, but [Tanjent] decided to go pretty in depth in the design. They are 1″ wide octagons with 3 super bright LEDs and a microphone. The microphone is sampled at 4400 hz by the [...]

RepRap wedge

Posted: August 27th, 2009, 8:30am MDT by Mike Szczys

Generation 2.0 of RepRap, the self replicating 3d printer, is approaching realization. Code named “Mendel”, the new design will be wedge shaped rather than a box which offers a few benefits. The overall design is smaller than the original RepRap but the printable area is larger. This means more functionality with less building material. With [...]

Foundation cooling

Posted: August 26th, 2009, 6:56pm MDT by James Munns

Overclockers are always trying to come up with new, colder, and quieter ways to keep their PCs cool. [gigs] was so dedicated to this, he decided to lay 6 meters of copper pipe to use as a radiator in his new house’s foundation. As of now, the foundation is laid (copper pipes and all), and [...]

Experimental search engine display

Posted: August 26th, 2009, 3:32pm MDT by Caleb Kraft

goodTimes.searchEngine is an experimental set up to display search engine results. Be sure you’re using Firefox or IE, because it isn’t working with chrome right now. [Gordon] pointed us to it and asked for our feedback. We had a pretty quick list of improvements we would like to see, such as the category changes not [...]

PS3 Slim Teardown

Posted: August 26th, 2009, 3:28pm MDT by Zach Banks

The new PS3 Slim has just been released, and ifixit has already posted a teardown. First, they easily removed the included 120GB hard drive, suggesting that upgrading it shouldn’t be too hard. In order to get inside the cover, however, they needed to use a security Torx screwdriver. In the end, the Blu-ray drive turned [...]

Propeller Platform

Posted: August 26th, 2009, 2:30pm MDT by James Munns

[nmcclana] has posted an assembly walkthrough for an Arduino-style prototyping board for the 80 MHz, eight core Parallax Propeller Microcontroller. While not board compatible with Arduino shields like the ARM-based Maple board we covered, it does have that familiar layout, and provides access to all 32 I/O pins, and the 3.8″ x 2.5″ footprint was kept in mind [...]

DIY bench vice

Posted: August 26th, 2009, 2:08pm MDT by Mike Szczys

A bench vice can be one of the most used tools in your workshop. For those that don’t have a workshop [Matt] built a vice that clamps to a table. He used scrap wood, MDF, threaded rod, washers, nuts, and wing nuts. Cheap, easy to build, and very useful! [via Toolmonger] [...]

Hard rock radio

Posted: August 26th, 2009, 1:30pm MDT by Mike Szczys

[Guus] sent in his project where he put a radio inside of a rock. He started with a 1970’s car stereo and encapsulated it in cement by wrapping it in duct tape, building a wooden form around it, and pouring in the wet cement. Three ports are included on the back for power, antennae, and [...]

WiFi Mapping with a smartphone

Posted: August 26th, 2009, 1:00pm MDT by Brett Haddock

Not so long ago, mapping WiFi required a laptop, GPS, a big antenna and Kismet/NetStumbler. Today’s smartphones have replaced even this task. For those of us running a GPS and WiFi equipped Windows Mobile phone, WiFiFoFum is an excellent and simple solution, as well as a great companion for installing an AP. Start up WiFiFoFum, [...]

Twitter as a botnet command center

Posted: August 26th, 2009, 12:37pm MDT by Matt Schultz

The folks over at Arbor Networks were browsing Twitter and discovered something very strange: a Twitter account seemingly posting gibberish. At least, that’s how it appeared at first. Upon closer investigation, they discovered that the profile was posting base64 encoded links to PKZIP archives. When they extracted the contents and unpacked the contained DLL and [...]

Open-Frame digital clock

Posted: August 26th, 2009, 9:37am MDT by Caleb Kraft

Here’s an interesting project from several years ago. The clock design itself isn’t too noteworthy, but the construction is definitely inspired. You’ll notice that there is no breadboard or PCB, the frame actually is the circuit. The tubes he’s using are Numitron tubes, which aren’t as high voltage as Nixies or even VFDs. This means [...]

SpiderBot emulates spider-man

Posted: August 26th, 2009, 8:00am MDT by Gerrit Coetzee

Spiderbot moves with four magnetic grapplers that it can launch, detach, and aim according to it’s path planning algorithm. While the robot is definitely not a final product and is quite a bit away from moving with the same grace and speed as our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, it is definitely one of the more interesting [...]

HTPC inside a cellular phone

Posted: August 25th, 2009, 6:01pm MDT by Mike Szczys

Reader [Jani] always wanted to throw a PC into an old school cell phone. He based this around the extremely small Commell LS-371 motherboard which measures just 146×101 mm (~5.9×4 in). He found room behind an existing access door for a DVI connector and audio in/out. He even incorporated an OLED screen, secondary sound card [...]

Single can mini fridge

Posted: August 25th, 2009, 5:54pm MDT by Jakob Griffith

What looks like a potential WMD, requires a huge power supply, and has several fans and wires dangling off the sides? Why a mini fridge of course! Your cubical buddy at work may have a Perfect Coffee Mug, or a USB powered fridge but it wont be as large of a caliber as [CaptPikel's]. Little [...]

Arduino based synthesizer

Posted: August 25th, 2009, 5:00pm MDT by Mike Szczys

[Jacob] is working on his final project for the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design. Based around Arduino, the quality and quantity of his build notes make this a fascinating read and there are several examples to listen to. The project features a brilliant idea for input: He uses a 1/8″ TRS connector (mini-jack) whose tip is [...]

BlackBerry Storm 2 teardown

Posted: August 25th, 2009, 4:30pm MDT by Matt Schultz

Photos of the BlackBerry Storm 2, both inside and out, have been leaked. Engadget provides us with the specifics, going into detail about the four large piezoelectric pressure sensors that sit underneath the screen. It looks as though the screen will still function as a button, just without the physical movement of the previous model [...]

Google Maps adds arterial traffic monitoring

Posted: August 25th, 2009, 4:00pm MDT by Matt Schultz

Traffic monitoring has been available on Google Maps for some time, but has been limited to highways and major roads. According to the Google LatLong blog, traffic tracking support is now available for smaller surface roads in select cities. The data is gathered through mobile phones running My Location. Anybody wishing to help out can [...]

Fritzing, go from prototype to product

Posted: August 25th, 2009, 3:15pm MDT by Mike Szczys

Fritzing is an open source project designed to help you move from a prototype to a finished project. Aimed at those basing their projects around Arduino, you start by building your physical prototype, then recreate it with Fritzing software’s graphical editor. From there you can generate a schematic, PCB artwork, and PCB production files. [thanks CH] [...]

Passwords on floppy disk

Posted: August 25th, 2009, 2:30pm MDT by Mike Szczys

[Wehrdo] has posted a guide with an extremely low-tech solution to password management. He literally put the passwords on a floppy disk in the form of paper glued to the magnetic film. For those that still have some floppy disks around, this is a zero cost hack. We wouldn’t recommend this for state secrets, but [...]

Learn from the Ice Tube Clock

Posted: August 25th, 2009, 1:45pm MDT by Mike Szczys

Looks like they’re at it again over at Adafruit. This time they’ve produced a clock that looks more like it should be attached to a munition rather than cruising bedside. But, geek-cred aside, there’s a lot to be learned from their design. Like we’ve grown to expect, they’ve put together some good documentation on their [...]

KernelCheck kernel compiler

Posted: August 25th, 2009, 1:00pm MDT by Mike Szczys

If you’ve ever tried compile a linux kernel yourself you know the headache of configuring and taking care of dependencies. KernelCheck makes this a point and click process for debian based linux distributions such as Ubuntu. You can use it to compile and install any 2.6.* stable kernel as well as the bleeding edge. KernelCheck [...]

Regulated breadboard PSU

Posted: August 25th, 2009, 12:32pm MDT by Mike Szczys

SparkFun has released a breadboard power suppy that can provide regulated 3.3v or 5v. Unlike the supply we saw from adafruit industries earlier this summer, this one is based on an lm317. This small device features on/off switch, voltage selection swith, and appropriately spaced pin headers to plug into both the top and bottom rails [...]

Hacking the Western Digital TV media player

Posted: August 25th, 2009, 10:33am MDT by Matt Schultz

Western Digital recently released a media player that attaches to your TV and allows you to play HD media straight from an external USB drive to the television. With a price point of about $100, it’s strange that the device hasn’t made more of a stir in the consumer electronics market. Of course, if it [...]

Lightweight Webkit based browsers

Posted: August 25th, 2009, 10:30am MDT by Brett Haddock

With netbooks being slim and mostly utilitarian, it seems a bit contradictory to use a standard and somewhat bulky web browser with them. After all, we’re trimming down the operating system to perform faster on these little devices, so why not thin out the focal point of the netbook: the browser. Firefox, Chrome, or Safari [...]

Ruggedize your not-so-rugged portables

Posted: August 25th, 2009, 9:30am MDT by Mike Szczys

Popular Mechanics has a detailed how-to on diy ruggedization of common portable electronics such as laptops, cameras, and cellphones. There is video of a laptop surviving an eight foot fall due to the tennis balls, pipe insulation, and weather stripping they’ve added. Its not just shock resistant, they’ve used a two-part compound marketed for making [...]

Palm Pre GPS Tweets

Posted: August 25th, 2009, 9:01am MDT by Caleb Kraft

[Mike] sent in this project he’s been working on. He has posted instructions on how to get your Palm Pre to tweet its GPS coordinates at regular intervals. It does require that you have Linux installed on your Pre, but that’s not that big of an issue as he has a tutorial for that too. [...]

Wire glue

Posted: August 25th, 2009, 8:30am MDT by Mike Szczys

[John P. Barker] writes up an interesting product called Wire Glue. This conductive adhesive is a paint-on alternative to soldering. At first it seems like a bizarre product but we can think of a few uses. Who hasn’t had a solder joint on a free-formed circuit break? One thing’s for sure, we’d recommend throwing a [...]

Nokia Booklet and N900

Posted: August 24th, 2009, 4:06pm MDT by Jakob Griffith

Nokia is currently one of the leading phone providers and intends to jump higher on the scale with the Nokia N900 powered by Maemo. But what wasn’t expected was for Nokia to step into the netbook pool. Called the Booklet 3G, it sports 10.1 inch high(er) resolution display with HDMI output. For connectivity you can [...]

Android Developer Challenge 2 open for submissions

Posted: August 24th, 2009, 3:13pm MDT by Matt Schultz

Google has opened up a new Android Developer Challenge for submissions. About $2,000,000 in prize money is available, with $250,000 going to the best overall app. Submissions are due by August 31, leaving about a week to get apps in for judging. Time is short, but the prizes are big. Hopefully we’ll see some exciting [...]

210 LED lamp

Posted: August 24th, 2009, 12:00pm MDT by Jakob Griffith

Current fluorescent lamps are great for lighting large areas using very few Watts; however, LEDs are far more efficient at producing light and have less of an impact upon the environment considering there is no mercury within them. [Andrew] sent in his team’s LED florescent bulb. The first revision utilized 87 LEDs, but to increase [...]

Adding a DisplayLink monitor to a Linux router

Posted: August 24th, 2009, 11:00am MDT by Matt Schultz

Routers aren’t just for routing network traffic any more. With the help of alternative operating systems such as DD-WRT, Tomato, and OpenWrt, routers are now extremely customizable and can be utilized to suit a number of needs. The main issue with projects built around routers is the need to telnet or SSH into them to [...]

Bench power supply adapter

Posted: August 24th, 2009, 10:01am MDT by Matt Schultz

Every electronics workbench could benefit from having a bench power supply. Converting a PC power supply works, but often, it involves splicing wires and limits the supply to only bench use, and building one from scratch is definitely an undertaking. To counter this, [silic0re] and his father came up with a detachable adapter that simply [...]

Autogiro POV nostalgia

Posted: August 24th, 2009, 8:53am MDT by Caleb Kraft

This bit of nostalgia really caught our attention. A german hacker or “inventor” as we were called back then, came up with this interesting concept. He would project an image on to the moving blades of an Autogiro, relying on the POV effect to make it appear complete. While this is not the same system [...]

LEGO Mindstorms Sudoku Solver

Posted: August 24th, 2009, 8:30am MDT by Phil Burgess

Swedish hacker [Hans Andersson] is no stranger to puzzle-solving robots. His prior work, A Rubik’s cube-solving robot called Tilted Twister, made waves through the internet last year. [Hans’] latest project only has to work in two dimensions, but is no less clever. This new robot, built around the LEGO Mindstorms NXT system, “reads” a printed sudoku page, solves [...]

Humanoid Robot + Homebrew Waldo = Big Smiles

Posted: August 24th, 2009, 7:47am MDT by Phil Burgess

Robot enthusiast [Vitalijus Rodnovas] built this rig to allow a humanoid robot to mimic his own body movements in real time. [Rodonovas] refers to his man-machine interface as a “master-slave suit,” but elsewhere this is often called a waldo after a prescient 1942 [Robert Heinlein] novella. This project page is slight on details and is mostly written [...]

Klipsch speaker mods

Posted: August 23rd, 2009, 10:47am MDT by Caleb Kraft

[Patrick] has a pair of Klipsch speakers that continually needed the volume knob cleaned. After a bit of research, he found it was a common problem with the potentiometer chosen for the task. He decided to resolve the problem, not by replacing that potentiometer, but by modifying the speakers to be passive and running them [...]

Second hard drive in a Macbook pro

Posted: August 23rd, 2009, 9:27am MDT by Caleb Kraft

[Reid] wrote in to show us how to add a second hard drive to his Macbook Pro. He found that he hardly ever used his DVD drive, so sacrificed it in favor of added storage. What he found was that it had a proprietary adapter that he was unable to find for sale anywhere. Making [...]

Aspire One external antenna

Posted: August 23rd, 2009, 8:30am MDT by Jakob Griffith

External antennas on netbooks are notorious, from EEE PCs to the Panasonic CF-R1, but this is the first on an Acer Aspire One we’ve seen. [xRazorwirex] sent in his external antenna hack for the 802.11n capable D150, with the intention of increasing performance, but he says he can’t attest to any change. Unfortunately the lock [...]

Collect and analyze ECG data

Posted: August 22nd, 2009, 1:00pm MDT by Zach Banks

Although we’ve covered DIY ECGs before, [Scott Harden] sent in his version that gives an in-depth explanation of what to do with the collected data. He built a basic battery-powered op-amp-based ECG for under $1. The circuit just amplifies the signal from the chest leads and feeds it into a computer via the microphone port. [...]

A Linux server that tweets power changes

Posted: August 22nd, 2009, 11:37am MDT by Matt Schultz

Twitter has been used for lots of experiments, both useful and just for fun. [FIRESTORM_v1] sent in his project that falls under the useful category. When he wanted a way to monitor his server’s power statistics, Twitter was a logical choice. Similar to the Tweet-a-Watt, he wrote a script that posts messages from APCUPSd to a [...]

Maple beats up Arduino, takes its shields

Posted: August 22nd, 2009, 10:30am MDT by Phil Burgess

The Atmega168 at the heart of every Arduino is an eminently capable chip; its ilk have been seen working as a basic web server, playing back digital audio, even generating TV signals. But as projects continue to grow in sophistication, reality rears its ugly head: Arduino can handle any one of these tasks very well, but it [...]

The Serpent Mother

Posted: August 22nd, 2009, 9:30am MDT by Mikey Sklar

The Serpent Mother is certainly an appropriate name for this 168foot long snake fire art installation filled with enough goodies to impress anyone who is into flame effects. [The Flaming Lotus Girls] were allocated $60,000 in May of 2006 to bring this art project to Burning Man. A team of nearly 100 people worked together [...]

Bottled Nixie clock

Posted: August 22nd, 2009, 8:30am MDT by Jakob Griffith

Who could not love the tender glow of a Nixie display? It isn’t a new concept for them to be used in clocks, and usually it’s how they are housed or encased for display that sets them apart. [crazy_phisic] did the near impossible by building his Nixie clock almost entirely inside of a glass bottle. [...]

Homebrew Wii via the bannerbomb exploit

Posted: August 21st, 2009, 3:18pm MDT by Matt Schultz

The Twilight Princess hack doesn’t work on newer versions of the Nintendo Wii, but thanks to a new exploit for the Wii, homebrew is still possible. Using an SD card and a few files, you can have the homebrew channel up and running in no time. The folks at Lifehacker show us how it’s done. [...]

OpenPogo, an alternative to Pogoplug software

Posted: August 21st, 2009, 2:30pm MDT by Matt Schultz

Many of us heard the news of Marvell’s SheevaPlug plug-in PC being released alongside its consumer solution counterparts. One of the prominent products based on the SheevaPlug hardware is the Pogoplug. The Pogoplug is essentially a no-configuration media server that allows you to plug in a hard drive and network cable to make data readily [...]

Passive infrared (PIR) sensor tutorial

Posted: August 21st, 2009, 2:00pm MDT by Phil Burgess

[ladyada] has a freshly-published and amazingly thorough tutorial on passive infrared (PIR) motion sensors. Most often seen in security floodlights and automatic doors, in creative hands these sensors can be put to other uses—cat flaps, camera triggers and purely artistic applications—as you’ll see in several demo projects and videos. For the curious, the tutorial provides a good amount of [...]

Tunneling IP traffic over ICMP

Posted: August 21st, 2009, 1:26pm MDT by Matt Schultz

We all hate it when we find an unencrypted WiFi network at our favorite coffee shop, restaurant, airport, or other venue, only to discover that there are traffic restrictions. Most limited networks allow HTTP and HTTPS traffic only, or so is the common misconception. In the majority of cases, ICMP traffic is also allowed, permitting [...]

Arduino USB host shield

Posted: August 21st, 2009, 10:57am MDT by Phil Burgess

Circuits@Home has been journaling their development of a USB host mode shield for Arduino, which could bring the platform a veritable explosion of mass storage, keyboard input and countless other peripheral options (and a corresponding raft of new hacks). Currently at the prototype stage, a ready-made shield and library are forthcoming, so keep checking back. Meanwhile, for embedded [...]

CBS to advertise using Video-in-Print technology

Posted: August 21st, 2009, 10:00am MDT by Nick Caiello

In what seems like another move to blur the line between digital and print media, CBS has announced that they will be introducing something called Video-in-Print technology in next month’s issue of Entertainment Weekly. Video-in-Print, or ViP, technology consists of a small LCD screen and circuit board that can be inserted into print media and [...]

Handbot, the shelf climbing bot

Posted: August 21st, 2009, 7:23am MDT by Caleb Kraft

Handbot is one piece of a larger project called Swarmanoid. The aim of the swarmanoid is to replicate the functions we usually desire out of a humanoid bot with a whole swarm of specialized bots. That seems like a silly goal to us, considering the only requirement for a humanoid bot is that it be [...]

Layar augmented reality launches

Posted: August 20th, 2009, 7:27pm MDT by Jakob Griffith

Layar brings augmented reality to your cellphone with the release of Layar Reality Browser 2.0. Partnering with Layar, Brightkite improves the experience by accessing their content, along with Wikipedia, Twitter, and other services; then by using the camera on your cellphone, maps friends and other users data on the screen, over top of the live [...]

PS3 Slim axes Linux support

Posted: August 20th, 2009, 4:29pm MDT by Matt Schultz

We may have all been eagerly awaiting the arrival of the PS3 slim, but don’t get too excited yet. According to an official press release from Sony, the PS3’s slimmer counterpart is dropping the ability to install Linux or another operating system. It’s always a shame when new products come packed with less features, but [...]

Hacking at Random

Posted: August 20th, 2009, 3:52pm MDT by Caleb Kraft

The 20th Hacking At Random has recently come to a finish. For the unititiated, Hacking At Random or HAR is a massive hacker festival that happens every four years in the Netherlands. Four days of technology obsessed hacking with roughly 2500 people definitely piques our interest. The event is riddled with classes and people speaking on [...]

Interactive LED block wall

Posted: August 20th, 2009, 1:00pm MDT by Matt Schultz

[Dave Vondle] from IDEO Labs sent in the large LED pixel wall he built using BlinkM modules, an Arduino, and Flash to control it. The overall result is a blindingly bright, large, public display for people to interact with. The best part about the project is that [Dave Vondle] documents everything; from hardware to schematics [...]

Modular computing

Posted: August 20th, 2009, 8:41am MDT by Caleb Kraft

This is the Illuminato X Machina, a “cellular” style computing system. Each unit is a fully functioning computer with its own processor, storage and communications. You can watch above as a change in the operating software is propagated across the grid. You can see the LEDs in the video going nuts, there are actually LEDs [...]

Condom testing robot

Posted: August 20th, 2009, 7:41am MDT by Caleb Kraft

Broken condoms are a serious concern, not only for those who break them, but the companies who manufacture them. When studying the common reasons for breakage, a coital robot was used to simulate usage. Though it isn’t much of a robot, consisting mainly of simple pneumatics, it does serve its purpose. The study was able [...]

E-bike across Canada for $10

Posted: August 19th, 2009, 7:00pm MDT by Mikey Sklar

[Justin Lemire-Elmore] spent one month riding his electric bike across Canada last summer. He made the journey from Vancouver to Halifax in 30 days using a mere $10 worth of electricity to recharge his bike. He put together a rather bizarre looking semi-recumbent bicycle to hold all of his gear. The motor controller, charge controller, [...]

Etch aluminum control panels

Posted: August 19th, 2009, 6:29pm MDT by Mikey Sklar

This clever Instructable demonstrates how to etch beautiful aluminum control panels for electronics projects. We like how similar this process is to DIY circuit board etching. Both abide by the same technique and use blue transfer paper. The primary difference is in the use of muriatic acid and hydrogen peroxide for etching aluminum. [...]

Xbox crammed into inch-thick package

Posted: August 19th, 2009, 4:10pm MDT by Matt Schultz

Reminiscent of [Ben Heck]’s portable and laptop console mods, [Bandit5317] over at Xbox-Scene managed to fit the guts of an original Xbox into a custom-built slim case that measures just 2.5 centimeters thick. In his post, he describes some of the difficulties of cutting down a behemoth Xbox to a third of its original size, such [...]

Rename files en masse in Windows

Posted: August 19th, 2009, 2:29pm MDT by Matt Schultz

Everybody hates it when they have to rename a fileset to fit a new naming scheme. Instead of doing it the hard way and writing a one-time script to go through and rename everything, check out Bulk Rename Utility from [Jim Willsher]. It provides you with a multitude of methods to take care of business [...]

Quick and dirty magnetic card reader

Posted: August 19th, 2009, 10:06am MDT by Caleb Kraft

[nevdull] found himself in possession of a magnetic card reader. What else was he to do but show us all how to read from it using an AVR? He goes through the basics of how the card reader works, as well as how to detect the different card states such as entering, reading, leaving. There [...]

Moon phase light modification

Posted: August 19th, 2009, 8:46am MDT by Caleb Kraft

In this project, a moon phase light is modified to show the actual moon phase based off of your computer’s internal clock. From the factory, these moon lights are updated via an infra red remote control. He pulled the brains from the clock and replaced them with an Arduino. He then runs a program that [...]

Kegbot

Posted: August 19th, 2009, 7:42am MDT by Caleb Kraft

The folks at Revision3 really know what gets our pulse going. In this episode, they show us how they built a radio controlled keg. Not only is the system built sturdy enough to cart around the keg, it is also built with the capability for the driver to control the beer flow. This isn’t too [...]

Cheap SD card cradle

Posted: August 18th, 2009, 3:32pm MDT by Caleb Kraft

When utilizing an SD card in your projects, you would generally buy an SD card slot to wire in. Sometimes, you just don’t plan that far ahead, or maybe you just want to play with an SD a little bit to see what you think. [Kroden] shows us how to make a fairly simple and [...]

Teardown of the Barista

Posted: August 18th, 2009, 10:00am MDT by Steve Watkins

iFixit has done a tear down on the symbolic do-it-yourself Espresso machine, the Starbucks Barista. Believe it or not, there is not a single circuit board in the works. There doesn’t seem to be much to the Barista; A few switches, some solenoids, a heater, and one way spring valve among other things. The assembly of [...]

The wake up machine

Posted: August 18th, 2009, 8:57am MDT by Caleb Kraft

Meet the Wakeup Machine. It is here to ensure that you are up and ready to go when the time comes. This machine will vibrate your bed, remove the sheets, make coffee, play music, even adjust the temperature in the room for optimal wake up experiences. We like the large heavy industrial look of it [...]

WiFi spectrum analyzer

Posted: August 18th, 2009, 7:52am MDT by Caleb Kraft

[Tim] noticed a 2.4Ghz WiFi spectrum analyzer on thinkgeek a while ago and got curious. He knew that the spectrum analyzers with which he was familiar were giant expensive units, so he got curious what this little dongle was. It turns out, it really wasn’t much at all. Just a simple wireless receiver. He decided that [...]

Streamfile encrypted file drop

Posted: August 17th, 2009, 7:00pm MDT by Eliot Phillips

There are myriad file transfer services on the web. Streamfile tries to set itself apart by providing a unique secure service. Their file upload system is all JavaScript and doesn’t rely on Flash. It uses SSL to secure the file transport. As soon as you start uploading the file, you can hand the link off [...]

Adafruit releases new TV-B-Gone kit

Posted: August 17th, 2009, 6:15pm MDT by Nick Caiello

Recently, our friends over at Adafruit released a new version of their popular TV-B-Gone kit. Built in cooperation with [Mitch Altman], the inventor of the TV-B-Gone, the new kit sports four high power IR LEDs, two wide beam and two narrow beam. The four LEDs give the new TV-B-Gone increased range, with a maximum distance [...]

1-Click Android rooting

Posted: August 17th, 2009, 4:45pm MDT by Eliot Phillips

In the last few days, rooting the T-Mobile G1 and myTouch 3G has become much easier. [Zinx] released FlashRec which lets you flash a new recovery image onto your Android phone. It takes advantage of Linux kernel vulnerability CVE-2009-2692. The app lets you backup your current image and then flashes Cyanogen’s Recovery Image 1.4. Once [...]

Automated blinds

Posted: August 17th, 2009, 4:08pm MDT by Caleb Kraft

Inspired by the multitudes of other automated window blind projects, [John] decided to build his own simpler design. Knowing his Arduino was massive overkill (yes, we hear you all cheering) he picked up a picaxe 08m starter kit. Looking at his very simple circuit, you’ll notice there are no resistors or capacitors. He designed it [...]

Snes on an Xbox360

Posted: August 17th, 2009, 3:05pm MDT by Caleb Kraft

Surprisingly the Xbox 360 hasn’t seen a lot of homebrew action. [tmbinc] has taken it upon himself to port the Snes9x emulator to it. There’s no pretty GUI, and its not running on top of linux or anything. This is native, directly to the hardware emulation. He believes this is the first to do so. [...]

Ipod shuffle remote

Posted: August 17th, 2009, 2:11pm MDT by Caleb Kraft

[Dennis] points out that the iPod shuffle and the iPod remote are almost identical visually. He decided to combine the two so he always had his remote with him. He pulled the guts out of a remote and mounted them in a shuffle. The remote functions all of the time, while the shuffle only turns [...]

The Happillow project

Posted: August 17th, 2009, 7:39am MDT by Caleb Kraft

[Harandi] wrote to us to let us know about a project he’s working on to improve our nightly rest. This is the Happillow. The Happillow is an alarm clock, as well as a snore relief system. We’re not sure that the snoring bothers us so much, but we’re sure our significant others appreciate that part. [...]

Colored pyrotechnics

Posted: August 16th, 2009, 5:09pm MDT by Caleb Kraft

Regular submitter [Jared Bouck] from Inventgeek.com has sent us this cool project. He wanted to make a fireball cannon, but didn’t want to settle for plain old fireballs.Instead of using a common propane system, he built an alcohol based one so he had a “blank slate” to start with. He then applied some copper chloride [...]

EEVblog: the Electronics Engineering video blog

Posted: August 16th, 2009, 10:00am MDT by Nick Caiello

Have you ever wanted to see what it’s like inside of a PCB assembly factory? Have you ever wondered how digital storage oscilloscopes work? If so, be sure to check out the EEVblog podcast. The Electronics Engineering video blog podcast, hosted by [Dave Jones], was created for anyone interested in learning more about electrical engineering. [...]

Robert Crumb ghetto hacks

Posted: August 15th, 2009, 9:46am MDT by Caleb Kraft

[Robert Crumb], the celebrated artist who created the commonly recognized keep on truckin, Fritz the cat, and mr natural can be seen here doing a ghetto hack. His record was warped, so he had to melt it in the oven to flatten it out. While [R. Crumb] may not be the epitome of celebrity and wealth, [...]

Etching agitator

Posted: August 15th, 2009, 7:36am MDT by Caleb Kraft

It might be a little bit of overkill, but this etching container agitator sure looks convenient. There’s not much to it technically, a small circuit with an ATtiny45. For those beginning with this stuff, he has written a pretty good tutorial on working with basic microcontrollers. If you are more interested in a tutorial on [...]

Building an Apple 1

Posted: August 14th, 2009, 1:25pm MDT by Caleb Kraft

With all the recent talk of hackintoshes going around, we thought we should post this oldie. It is a writeup on how to build your own Apple 1 called Replica 1. If you’ve got the $149 laying around and think you can handle the construction of a mere 88 components, you can make one yourself. [...]

Quote of the Day

Posted: August 14th, 2009, 11:34am MDT by Eliot Phillips

i have no idea why sites focused around diy electronics have such aggressive comments – Hack a Day applicant That is weird. What do you think? Comments go!

Solid state tesla coil

Posted: August 14th, 2009, 9:45am MDT by Steve Watkins

While researching solid state Tesla coils we stumbled across this old project. As you have probably guessed from the pictures, this coil is meant to actually play music. Knowing how to add eye catching flare, the coiler uses a Plexiglas frame turned light pipe; only to be complimented by an audio amplifier complete with graphic [...]

Home built Delta Robot

Posted: August 14th, 2009, 8:36am MDT by Caleb Kraft

Theres an interesting thread going on at RoboterNetz.de (translated) about building delta robots. For those who haven’t seen delta robots before, be sure to check the video after the break for some really impressive agility displays. A delta robot usually has 3 arms connected to a single point at the end. This configuration allows the [...]

Logging weight changes

Posted: August 14th, 2009, 7:14am MDT by Caleb Kraft

This is a classic example of a well done hack, simply for the sake of hacking. [Jorge] wanted to be able to chart his weight changes. His solution wasn’t to simply buy a scale that could be hooked to the computer. Those are available and aren’t really that expensive. He could have even used pencil [...]

James R. Knight memorial organ

Posted: August 13th, 2009, 5:30pm MDT by Caleb Kraft

[Jared] wanted to do something monumental to commemorate his late father. His idea was to take this organ console and convert it to a digital beast powered by Hauptwerk software. The project is slated to take 18 to 24 months to complete, at which point he’s going to donate it to his church. You can [...]

Sleepy Arduino saves batteries

Posted: August 13th, 2009, 3:20pm MDT by Caleb Kraft

Battery life is often overlooked when building projects, especially for beginners. This tutorial takes you through the setup of power saving modes for the Arduino. Utilizing the watchdog and sleep functions, they put the chip into a hibernation mode between cycles. An optimum configuration could take your battery life from 4 days to about 3 [...]

Tome GS and Tome MP

Posted: August 13th, 2009, 10:41am MDT by Caleb Kraft

[Dennis] tipped us off to his Tome project. It looks like two projects using very similar hardware. The first is the Tome GS; a tiny game system that looks like it could hang from a keychain. This is apparently the second revision of this system, based off of some of his comments. He’s done a [...]

Tatjana van Vark

Posted: August 13th, 2009, 8:33am MDT by Caleb Kraft

Go to this site and you’ll be greeted by a crazy looking woman wielding a giant egg and a blunt object that looks like Jupiter with mischief in her eyes. This is Tatjana van Vark. Her library of projects ranges from the mundane such as a couple of incandescent lamps, to a fully functional Antikythera [...]

PCB toner transfer with dowel

Posted: August 12th, 2009, 3:00pm MDT by Gerrit Coetzee

Pulsar Professional FX has a neat tip on their site for getting a really even toner transfer when making your own PCBs. First, the PCB is cut to size, and the paper is tacked to the board. Then, the PCB is placed paper up onto a dowel and rolled back and forth with the iron. [...]

The Big Picture: More Robots

Posted: August 12th, 2009, 2:36pm MDT by Eliot Phillips

The Big Picture is Boston.com’s daily news photo blog. Each day they pick a particular story and feature some of the best news photography around. Today they chose robots and have 36 photos highlighting current robot research. This is a followup to a similar post from March. It’s interesting to see all the different forms [...]

Home injection molding

Posted: August 12th, 2009, 2:00pm MDT by Gerrit Coetzee

[Kenneth Maxon] is a wizard who only does things one way, beautifully. While out of the average hacker’s production capabilities, his injection molding machine is amazing to behold. The machine has all features a commercial model would. It heats and cools the mold, produces over a ton of pressure to inject plastic with, and ejects [...]

AVGA: The AVR based video game platform

Posted: August 12th, 2009, 12:55pm MDT by Nick Caiello

We’ve seen our fair share of AVR projects, but this one’s pretty cool. AVGA is a color video game development platform based on the Atmel AVR family of microcontrollers. As seen in the picture above, one of the AVRs that the project uses is the popular ATMega168. There were several technical hurdles to using the [...]

Ecce Robot

Posted: August 12th, 2009, 8:53am MDT by Caleb Kraft

According to the video, Ecce Robot is a new paradigm in robotics. We don’t know if that’s true or not, but we really enjoy the drive system. They have mimicked the biological structures in humans using elastic cables and cheap drill motors as muscles. It is intriguing to watch the complexity that even a simple [...]

Hackit: Ideal conference badge?

Posted: August 11th, 2009, 6:05pm MDT by Eliot Phillips

In 2006, Defcon 14 premiered a unique electronic badge. All it did was blink, but it raised the bar for what was expected from a hacker conference badge. In 2007, they went from 2 LEDs to 95 in a scrolling marquee. Along with a POV mode, the badge had two capacitive switches to let the [...]

Hack a Day is hiring

Posted: August 11th, 2009, 4:32pm MDT by Eliot Phillips

We’ve added a handful of contributors in the last couple months, but we’re still looking for more people to contribute daily posts and help expand the site. This is a paid, freelancing position that requires professionalism, consistency, and reliability. We want to hear from people that are passionate about software/hardware hacking and growing Hack a Day. [...]

Dry Ice Cannon

Posted: August 11th, 2009, 12:29pm MDT by Caleb Kraft

sent in his entry into a “creativity contest” at his university. He and some friends put together this dry ice cannon. Take note of the creative mechanism they used to mix the water with the dry ice. A large amount of gas is expelled as soon as the two begin to meet. If the [...]

Scratch gestures

Posted: August 10th, 2009, 6:02pm MDT by Eliot Phillips

The folks at Carnegie Mellon are working on yet another novel input method. Using microphones they’ve started tracking the sound of surface scratching. Scratching creates much higher frequencies than the human voice so they’re easy to filter. The sound can be processed to determine the motion being made. The demo video below shows the velocity [...]

HackTheBadge 1.0

Posted: August 10th, 2009, 3:06pm MDT by Caleb Kraft

[Martin] tipped us off to HackTheBadge 1.0. Possibly more elusive than the NinjaBadge, HackTheBadge has a Dpad, a 3×5 LED matrix, Arduino compatable headers, and 46 GPIO channels. You can download the open source plans if you didn’t get one at Defcon. You probably didn’t, there were only 14 given out. You can also order [...]

Ninja Networks Party Badge

Posted: August 10th, 2009, 1:13pm MDT by Eliot Phillips

UPDATE: The director’s cut of the story While coverage of the official Defcon badge has been pretty heavy, there was a badge that was far more exclusive and talked about way more. For the last ten years at Defcon a group of hackers known as Ninja Networks hosted an invitation-only party for selected attendees. For the [...]

DOSbox on Zipit

Posted: August 10th, 2009, 7:31am MDT by Caleb Kraft

Who out there has a Zipit? Great, now out of the five of you, who really wants to run Dos on it? Well, for the one or two of you left reading, now you can. The directions can be found here. [Hunter] has worked out a way to get DosBox running on his Zipit. At [...]

Neo Geo mini arcade

Posted: August 9th, 2009, 5:01pm MDT by Eliot Phillips

[Pocket Lucho], the builder of mini arcade cabinets, is back with another build. This time it’s a miniature Neo Geo arcade machine (translated). The build is very compact and neat. He attached the control panel and the PS one display using magnets to make the wiring more accessible. It has video out and second player [...]

Pressure sensitive keyboard

Posted: August 9th, 2009, 9:41am MDT by Caleb Kraft

The Applied Sciences group in Microsoft Hardware have come up with an interesting tool. This is a pressure sensitive keyboard. Our minds went strait to gaming, as theirs did too apparently. They show how this could give you more control in your games based on how hard you push the button. Remember the first time [...]

Tiny bluetooth teardown

Posted: August 8th, 2009, 4:30pm MDT by Eliot Phillips

The folks at SparkFun were startled by how small USB bluetooth adapters had become so they split one open. They noted a few interesting design features. It has a small folded trace antenna on the board edge. The metal USB housing acts as the RF shield. The bluetooth IC is an AS3620QA. Now we wonder [...]

Giant bulb VU meter

Posted: August 8th, 2009, 3:30pm MDT by Eliot Phillips

The latest Inventgeek project is a 12 outlet control box. They decided to demo it using a giant bulb based VU meter. The control box has 12 individual outlets hooked up to two layers of six solid state relays. [Jared] notes that SSRs can be very expensive, but he purchased his on eBay for ~$10 [...]

OmniDirectional Research Platform

Posted: August 8th, 2009, 2:36pm MDT by Eliot Phillips

[Shachar Geiger] sent in an interesting project that he worked on with [Tal Avivi] at the Bezalel academy in Jerusalem. They were given the task of designing a 1-person electrical urban vehicle. They took some cues from MIT’s Transology and designed the OmniDirectional Research Platform (ODRi). There’s a video of it embedded above. It can [...]

Thank you Ian Lesnet

Posted: August 7th, 2009, 6:42pm MDT by Eliot Phillips

A little over a year ago [Ian Lesnet] joined our hacking team and began cranking out some of the best original how-tos Hack a Day has ever offered. You may remember our popular web server on a business card from last fall and we’re sure everyone is familiar with the Bus Pirate (yes, they’re still [...]

Droplet

Posted: August 7th, 2009, 3:04pm MDT by Caleb Kraft

[Andrew Rapp] sent in this project called Droplet. He’s been doing work with Xbees and Arduinos together and built this little toy. He describes it as “sort of like a Chumby”. It has built in services for Twitter, Google Calendar, News, Gmail, etc. You can download the full source code and plans on his site. [...]

CPU tachometer

Posted: August 7th, 2009, 7:20am MDT by Caleb Kraft

Recently, analog displays have come back in vogue. This is partially due to the common steam punk theme that is popular right now. [Cristiano] has done an analog display, but instead of brass and polished wood, he’s gone automotive themed with it. He purchased a cheap tachometer from ebay. A circuit had to be designed [...]

Robot subs compete

Posted: August 6th, 2009, 2:08pm MDT by Caleb Kraft

These Autonomous Underwater Vehicles are all competing in the 12th annual AUVSI competition. They have to complete an underwater obstacle course that involves some tight maneuvering, retrieval of a briefcase, dropping bombs, and firing torpedoes. We’ve seen several UAVs before, but we haven’t ever seen them weaponized and in action. Yeah, those weapons don’t look [...]

Tangible holograms

Posted: August 6th, 2009, 12:48pm MDT by Caleb Kraft

As you watch that video, you’ll probably find yourself wondering several things about the tangible hologram project. Why haven’t we seen these simple hologram setups used more often? Where did that cool air puff system come from and why haven’t we seen more on that? When will this be integrated into the latest Xbox/PS3/Wii? We [...]

Serial hacking with an ATtiny2313

Posted: August 6th, 2009, 7:14am MDT by Steve Watkins

[Sprite_tm] automated a portion of serial hacking by sniffing out the baud rate using an ATtiny2313 and FT232 breakout board. The firmware assumes 8 data bits, no parity, and 1 stop bit (8N1). This is pretty much defacto among serial ports so it should work well, though some devices do use different settings. The auto [...]

Review: The Manga Guide to Electricity

Posted: August 5th, 2009, 10:00am MDT by Gerrit Coetzee

“The Manga Guide to Electricity”, part of “The Manga Guide” series by No Starch Press, is a novel approach to the old problem of getting over the initial mental block when trying to learn electronics. We decided to compare this book to another introductory text: “Getting Started in Electronics” by [Forrest M. Mims]. [Mims]‘ book is [...]

WiiMote + iPhone

Posted: August 5th, 2009, 9:12am MDT by Caleb Kraft

Yo dawg, we heard you liked accelerometers… Apparently people have been wanting this for a while. We’re not completely sure why, so we’ll wait and see what gets done with it. [Ubiq_01] has connected a WiiMote to his iPhone and is using it to control and OpenGL application. He has released a tutorial (which seems [...]

Experimental Robotic Platform

Posted: August 5th, 2009, 7:32am MDT by Caleb Kraft

Introducing ERP: Experimental Robotic Platform. This is an open source, modular robotics platform that, as you can see above, didn’t fair too poorly in the Robogames 2009. [John] has been working on this platform for roughly 2 years and states that it will never be “finished”. It is a development platform, and is always changing [...]

Defcon 17: Badge hacking

Posted: August 4th, 2009, 9:08pm MDT by Nick Caiello

Following up on their post about the new Defcon 17 badges, Wired recently posted some of the best badge hacks of the con. Among the hacks featured were an LED frequency meter hack, a sound seeking dirigible powered by three badges, and a wireless geiger counter random number generator that sent random numbers back to [...]

Sticky light

Posted: August 4th, 2009, 1:39pm MDT by Zach Banks

With the availability of webcams and projectors, multitouch and interactive demos have become increasingly popular because they’re so easy. Students at the University of Tokyo took a new approach that uses lasers instead. They created Sticky Light, which uses mirrors, a laser, and a single photodetector. Unlike camera-tracking setups, this system requires no visual processing. [...]

Malicious ATM found at Defcon 17

Posted: August 4th, 2009, 12:02pm MDT by Caleb Kraft

A fake ATM machine, set to capture ATM information was found at Defcon 17 in vegas this year. Its design has a tinted plastic window at the top which attendees noticed had a computer in it. It was quickly removed by the police. Is this an amazing coincidence? We doubt it. Someone probably knew exactly [...]

Little Walker

Posted: August 4th, 2009, 8:34am MDT by Caleb Kraft

This little walking robot caught our eye. We’ve seen tons of 4 legged bots, but the design on this probably took more effort than the electronics. The design is radially symmetrical, it can walk in any direction, turn in place, and even walk upside down. The electronics weren’t forgotten though. This little bugger manages to [...]

BPSK on 433 MHz European ISM band

Posted: August 3rd, 2009, 5:41pm MDT by Steve Watkins

[WaveRider] is using a type of phase shift keying called BPSK to transmit digital sound and video for remote telemetry. Though a higher signal to noise ratio (SNR) is generally sought after with communications, legal limitations are imposed on total radiated power. To balance the two headed beast, he opted out on frequency shift keying [...]

Paintball Turret plans released

Posted: August 3rd, 2009, 10:39am MDT by Caleb Kraft

[Jared Bouck] is on a roll this week. We just covered his Diamond thermal paste and now he’s got more for us. To celebrate the re design of his website, he has released the plans for the paintball turret. As you may recall, we absolutely loved this design when he originally showed it to us. [...]

Defcon status at a hosting company

Posted: August 3rd, 2009, 8:24am MDT by Caleb Kraft

[Aaron] has been working at iweb hosting for about 5 years. When he started, the number of servers was small enough that managing them was fairly painless and could be done by just manually verifying that everything was operational. As the number of servers grew, this task became more and more difficult. They employed various [...]

Diamond thermal paste

Posted: August 3rd, 2009, 6:54am MDT by Gerrit Coetzee

[Jared Bouck] over at InventGeek writes about his experience making his own thermal paste. Diamonds can be up to five times as thermally conductive as silver, the primary ingredient in most popular thermal compounds. He combines 60,000 mesh diamond dust he ordered off eBay with non-conductive silicon grease using a special mixer he constructed to [...]

Smartphone anti-virus software

Posted: August 1st, 2009, 8:11am MDT by Zach Banks

With DEFCON and Black Hat going on, a lot of security issues are being made public. This year, cellphones have been a larger target than before. More and more people are carrying complex smartphones that have more ways to go wrong. Even worse, since phones are tied to a billed account, it is possible for [...]

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