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Hack A Day (7 unread)

Unbricking with the help of Arduino

Posted: June 14th, 2010, 4:00pm MDT by Mike Szczys

A This bricked Eee PC came to [Janzo] for about $50. Everything was fine with it, except for the failed bios update that rendered it useless to the last owner. [Janzo] set to work with an Arduino on a quest to repair the bios. He looked up the datasheet for the EEPROM that stores the [...]
Update: Flash_Destroyer final destroys EEPROM

Posted: June 14th, 2010, 2:17pm MDT by Mike Szczys

The Flash_Destroyer finally succeeded in rewriting that EEPROM until its demise. When we originally looked at the device it had already recorded 2.5 million successful rewrites. The first appearance of corrupt data occurred at 11,494,069 but that doesn’t tell the whole story. The chip kept working for another 200,000 rewrites before finally showing repeated data [...]
Monster Chess

Posted: June 14th, 2010, 1:05pm MDT by Jakob Griffith

Over 100,000 Lego pieces, 4 people a year to create, and a 12 foot by 12 foot chess board make this the largest most awesome Lego hack we’ve ever seen. Take that Lego Printer. For a mere $30,000 you too can have such a setup. Not a lot of information is out yet, but we [...]
Distance measurement input device

Posted: June 14th, 2010, 12:00pm MDT by Mike Szczys

[Larry] put a different spin on a television remote control. He used an Arduino and an IR receiver to learn the codes from the factory remote. Now that he can use an IR LED to playback these signals he worked on an alternative to pressing buttons as the input. The ultrasonic range finder seen above [...]
Radio-Walkman-megaphone hybrid

Posted: June 14th, 2010, 10:54am MDT by Mike Szczys

[Erich] rethought the use of a megaphone and ended up with this Mega-Tape-O-Phone. His first move was to ditch the megaphone’s amplifying circuitry in order to add his own based on an LM386 chip. From there a radio receiver joined the party followed by the guts of a tape player. He relocated the head of [...]
Ground your car to make it go

Posted: June 14th, 2010, 9:43am MDT by Caleb Kraft

This security system called G-spot requires that you touch a special place on the car prior to attempting to start it. This is pretty slick as it could be completely un-obvious and doesn’t require any special fobs or minor surgery. With the right placement, no one would ever notice that you had touched it. [via [...]
Electro Luminescent fun with Jeri Ellsworth

Posted: June 14th, 2010, 7:56am MDT by Caleb Kraft

[Jeri] got her hands on some of the DuPont Luxprint EL ink and had some fun conducting experiments. She tried different materials for the base and the display itself. Not only does she just play with materials, she also tears apart a VFD and an LCD to see if she could use them for parts. [...]