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Items by Devlin Thyne

Hack A Day

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  RepRapped Transistors

  Posted: December 15th, 2010, 7:30am MST by Devlin Thyne

  [Mr. Kim] and [John Sarik] made a presentation(pdf) at last weekend’s Botacon conference on how they made organic field-effect transistors (OFETs). A wooden RepRap, the fancifully named Unicorn from Makerbot (or printed from Thingiverse), hacked felt pen, a handful of chemicals, and a couple of pieces of lab equipment were needed to print (plot) out [...]
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  Garage Monitor Has an Extra Arduino

  Posted: December 14th, 2010, 2:57pm MST by Devlin Thyne

  [Jody] wanted to know when his garage door was open. He details his setup which uses a temperature sensor read by an Arduino to send over XBee radio to a computer running a Windows Service. We have seen this twice before, and is noteworthy as a lesson. The XBee radios have the ability to read [...]
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  Lessons in Electric Circuits

  Posted: November 13th, 2010, 7:06am MST by Devlin Thyne

  Are you looking for a good source of information to get started into making and hacking electric circuits? We would like to refer you to Lessons in Electric Circuits. Even if you have good knowledge of electronics, this is another tool you can use. The book is a work in progress and will have some [...]
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  3D Printed MakerBot

  Posted: June 5th, 2010, 9:00am MDT by Devlin Thyne

  [Webca] has made a 3D printed MakerBot with his MakerBot. Using five pounds of plastic, the design replaces all of the plywood used to create a regular MakerBot. This complements the existing designs for the 3D printed extruders, dinos, and other parts already on Thingiverse. An interesting mile marker in the history of 3D printing. [...]
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  Parallax RFID Reader for Ten Bucks

  Posted: May 29th, 2010, 7:33pm MDT by Devlin Thyne

  We  received a tip about Radio Shack putting Parallax’s RFID reader on clearance for around $10. The only reference we could find that indicated Radio Shack sold the reader was a review page. The reader originally sold for around $50 in the stores, so getting it for $10 made it worth a curiosity trip to [...]
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  Hack Your Crystal’s Frequency

  Posted: May 10th, 2010, 2:18pm MDT by Devlin Thyne

  [Drone] tipped us off about [Joachim]‘s efforts to alter a crystal’s frequency. Through a process called penning, a crystal’s resonant frequency is lowered by painting the crystal with an indelible ink marker. Our curiosity piqued, we went off  and found more information about penning crystals. It turns out this technique has been around for nearly [...]
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  SNES Controller + USB + Accelerometer

  Posted: April 9th, 2010, 12:48pm MDT by Devlin Thyne

  As we posted about [Atarity]’s XBMC hiding in an SNES controller, we were finishing work on a tutorial for [Adafruit]. The tutorial combines a Teensy USB development board with a 3D accelerometer inside of an SNES controller. The Teensy is programmed to poll the SNES controller buttons and read the accelerometer values. The buttons are [...]
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  How-to: Make a Mains Crossover Cable

  Posted: April 1st, 2010, 9:00am MDT by Devlin Thyne

  Update: This How-To was written for April Fools’ Day. It is not advised  you attempt to make or even use this cable. The comments have made it very clear how dangerous to you and others using this cable can be. The image above is not of a full male-to-male cable, only the ground is connected, [...]
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  DIY Diodes

  Posted: March 5th, 2010, 4:01pm MST by Devlin Thyne

  [H. P. Friedrichs], the creator of the Static Bleeder has created his own diodes. Using household chemicals, a film of cuprous oxide was made on a copper pipe cap. Cuprous oxide has been one of the first known semiconductor substances, has a low forward drop but is an otherwise asymmetrical conductor, odd V-I curves, and [...]
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  BatchPCB Pays You

  Posted: March 1st, 2010, 11:48am MST by Devlin Thyne

  SparkFun’s BatchPCB has been a well-known service to get your PCBs fabbed, and now it is sporting a new feature. It has just come out of its downtime chrysalis with the ability to pay you for making your designs. If you have designed a PCB and want people to pay you to use it, BatchPCB [...]
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  How To: Make a Printable CES Badge

  Posted: January 12th, 2010, 12:00pm MST by Devlin Thyne

  We figured we put you through enough posts about our CES badges without telling you how we did it or how to get one. This how-to will walk through the process of creating a badge from a dxf file for a logo. Then we will tell you where to get one. To start with, you will [...]
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  CES Update: Atmega128RFA1

  Posted: January 10th, 2010, 1:17pm MST by Devlin Thyne

  After posting about our visit and interview with [Vemund], the Atmel rep at CES. We got the feeling you needed to know some more. The thing that has got us pretty excited is the ATmega128RFA1(pdf) single-chip microcontroller and Zigbee radio module. It can be found in the ATmegaRFA1-EK1 development board. We look forward to seeing [...]
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  CES Update: CES Badges

  Posted: January 9th, 2010, 1:30pm MST by Devlin Thyne

  In a previous post we had given one of our badges out to [Bre Pettis] at the MakerBot booth. We have been called the “Skull Guys” around CES and were stopped multiple times by people that did not know of this site. [Bre] got an extra of the size we are wearing around. [Leo Laporte] [...]
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  CES Update: MakerBot Gets a Badge

  Posted: January 8th, 2010, 4:14pm MST by Devlin Thyne

  We visited the MakerBot Industries booth to give them one of our badges (post pending), say what’s up and meet the creators behind the creators of our lapel-sticking creations. They were excited to see us, so excited in fact that they gave us a small spool of the PLA they are about to carry in [...]
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  CES Update: A Visit to the Zigbee Booth

  Posted: January 8th, 2010, 1:11pm MST by Devlin Thyne

  We visited the Zigbee Alliance booth yesterday and talked to Atmel and TI reps. The very knowledgeable Atmel rep showed us a new development kit for Zigbee radios and gave us some of these modules above. We will be getting more information about this kit later on. The TI rep pointed us to the TI [...]
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  CES Update: x86 Processor Module in a DIP

  Posted: January 8th, 2010, 9:55am MST by Devlin Thyne

  While walking through the halls of CES yesterday, we came across this one booth that had a bunch of cool stuff, like a robotic hand. [iCOP] makes a cool set of x86 processor modules with dual 0.100″ spaced headers. This allows for easy prototyping on a breadboard so you can quickly put together your latest [...]
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  Arduino I/O Speed Breakdown

  Posted: January 6th, 2010, 7:32am MST by Devlin Thyne

  [Jee Labs] has worked out how long it takes for an Arduino to perform various I/O operations. Predictably, analogRead() takes the longest, followed by analogWrite(). Arduino really falls behind when it comes to digital pin I/O: digitalWrite() takes a whopping fifty times longer than a direct bit write to a port register!  This is something [...]
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  NES RAM Replacement

  Posted: January 4th, 2010, 12:50pm MST by Devlin Thyne

  [Spatula Tzar] Turned on her NES one day to find it no longer working. Off went the case and out came the oscilloscope. After probing around for a bit, she found that one of the RAM chips was very hot. She hot aired off the bad chip implementing an “Impenetrable Aluminum Heat Shield of Science” [...]
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  Arduino Headed for One Point Oh

  Posted: January 2nd, 2010, 11:00am MST by Devlin Thyne

  In a recent blog post, [Massimo] stated that there will be some stabilizing changes coming for the Arduino platform. The API, IDE, and even the website are targets for the Arduino team’s New Year’s resolutions to bring Arduino to 1.0. This platform is often seen at the core of projects we cover and many that [...]
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  GSM Cracked

  Posted: December 30th, 2009, 11:00am MST by Devlin Thyne

  [Karsten Nohl], with a group of security researchers has broken the A5/1 Stream Cipher behind GSM. Their project web site discusses their work and provides slides(pdf) presented at 26C3. A5/1 has had known vulnerabilities for some time now and is scheduled to be phased out for the newer KASUMI or A5/3 block cipher. This should [...]
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  Aural Twitter

  Posted: December 21st, 2009, 1:33pm MST by Devlin Thyne

  [POTUSCamacho] listens to his @public_timeline rss feed. In part one of his project, he describes creating a bash script in which he uses cURL get his private feed, sed to clean it and eSpeak to output a WAV file. In parts two and three, he goes on to discuss how he created an audio stream [...]
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  Roombas with UAV Brains Play Pac-Man

  Posted: November 10th, 2009, 6:53am MST by Devlin Thyne

   [Jack], [Cory], and [Maciej] are playing Pac-Man with Roombas on a lab floor. The Roombas are outfitted with ALIX3d2 single board computers running Gentoo and a software suite developed for UAVs at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Research and Engineering Center for Unmanned Vehicles. The hardware and software sections are quite in-depth and make [...]
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  Headpiece Jabbing for Smiles

  Posted: October 28th, 2009, 7:10am MDT by Devlin Thyne

  [Lauren] has created a facial conditioning device dubbed the Happiness Hat. The hat measures a sensor at the wearer’s cheek to determine if the wearer is smiling. When the hat does detects the wearer is not smiling, it activates a servo that prods the wearer. This project is fairly unique in that it provides haptic [...]
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  Hackable Geiger Counter

  Posted: October 21st, 2009, 4:00pm MDT by Devlin Thyne

  [Aaron] A.K.A. [A1ronzo] at SparkFun has put together a hackable USB Geiger Counter. In his tutorial, he gets the Geiger counter to work as a random number generator. Later, he analyzes and discusses how well it works as a random number generator.  In the past, we have seen a number of radiation detectors hacks such [...]
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  A Stirring Hack

  Posted: October 8th, 2009, 3:00pm MDT by Devlin Thyne

  [Oleg] of Circuits@Home and maker of the USB Isolation Board and the USB Host Shield has a new, two-part hack for his chemistry set. In Part 1 of  this hack, [Oleg] discusses the method he uses to make a stir bar spin and what types of stir bars work the best. Part 2 discusses the [...]
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  Thermoelectric Solar Power

  Posted: October 5th, 2009, 3:40pm MDT by Devlin Thyne

  [Colin] has put together an instructable for a solar power generator that uses the thermoelectric effect instead of the photovoltaic (PV) effect. We have seen Peltier devices used in cooling cans, solder paste, backs, and hacked hard drives. This is the first hack we have seen where a Peltier device is used to generate electricity [...]
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  Machining Gets Wet and Wild

  Posted: October 1st, 2009, 4:00pm MDT by Devlin Thyne

  [Tyler] has had his electrochemical machining hack up for a while now. His final version uses a pump to move electrolyte out through the etching head and onto the workpiece. This keeps fresh electrolyte in the etching region and clears out the insoluble material. We see how this could be attached to a CNC system [...]
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  Open Source Weapon Makes You Puke

  Posted: September 28th, 2009, 7:00am MDT by Devlin Thyne

  [Limor] of Adafruit Industries and the Ice Tube Clock has made her own open source non-lethal weapon: The Bedazzler. After attending a conference by the DHS where she saw the big-budget Dazzler, she decided to make her own. Thirty-six LEDs, six switching FETs, a Boarduino, and a former flashlight later, the Bedazzler makes a better [...]
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  Defocusing LED Clock

  Posted: September 21st, 2009, 3:06pm MDT by Devlin Thyne

  [Dennis] has created a well-documented and very beautiful clock in his latest project. This clock stands out from the other clock projects we have covered with its unique display. The seven segment LED displays mounted on a sled that moves them back and forth behind an array of fiber optic lenses, effectively taking the display [...]
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  USB Isolation

  Posted: September 18th, 2009, 8:00am MDT by Devlin Thyne

  [Oleg] over at Circuits@Home has made a USB isolator for his hacking needs. This isolator separates the signal, ground, and power lines of a USB host device, such as a PC, from a USB device like a USB oscilloscope or logic analyzer. This might be useful for Keyboard sniffing, ECG, EEG or diagnosing the control [...]
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  Tapping Tree Power

  Posted: September 10th, 2009, 12:00pm MDT by Devlin Thyne

  [bugloaf] tipped us off about this flower power hack. University of Washington researchers, [Babak], [Brian], and [Carlton] have developed very low power circuits to run directly off of trees. This builds upon the work of MIT researchers and Voltree Power. A voltage of up to around 200mV is generated between an electrode in a tree [...]
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  Variable Range Sprinkler

  Posted: September 4th, 2009, 11:00am MDT by Devlin Thyne

  [Pete], a musician, and the guy behind SparkFun’s pogobeds and locking footprints has a sprinkler hack. He wanted to keep his dog, Choppy, happy with a green lawn while also keeping his sidewalk water free. To solve this problem, he hacked his sprinkler and hose to adjust the sprinkler’s range. He uses an Arduino to [...]