Posted Jul 31st 2008 7:27AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: home entertainment hacks, misc hacks, daily
[Scott] shot us a tip about
some progress on hacking those creepy
[Elvis] heads produced by Wowee. The head uses a flash cartridge to store all the data used for the motion/audio control. The cartridge uses NAND flash, so a quick solder job to an XD flash card reader yielded a useful dump of the memory cartridge - which happened to be fat32 formatted. There's still plenty of work to do, but it seems that it'll be trivial to replace the data with custom audio and motion commands.
Posted Jul 29th 2008 8:50AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: peripherals hacks, daily
[Nicolas] sent in his
liquid display project.Think of it as the opposite of a fountain display. Instead of water, it releases bubbles into a flat panel filled with liquid. There aren't many details on the site, but it's a nice twist on an classic concept. He also created an odd sort of liquid interface. Touching the liquid in any of the three chambers in front causes changes in the reaction of the display.
Posted Jul 28th 2008 7:09AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: digital cameras hacks, peripherals hacks, daily
[Eduard] sent in his
IR webcam whiteboard project. He wanted something like the
Wiimote version, but without the expense of a Wiimote. He added some film negative to the camera to reduce the amount of visible light picked up by the CCD. (He notes that you might need to pull the IR filter from your camera to get a decent signal.) The pen is the usual IR LED with a power supply. To do the actual work, he wrote a custom application in Java.
Posted Jul 26th 2008 7:54AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: cellphones hacks, daily
[liseman] decided to build a
honeypot for bicycle thieves. He mounted a pay as you go cell phone and a gutted stun gun inside a water bottle. When the phone is dialed, the stun gun is activated thanks to a tap on the vibration motor inside the phone. He also installed some tracking software on the phone so the bike can be traced when stolen.
Location of the stun gun probes depends on certain assumptions: will the thief ride off on the bike, or simply toss it in the back of a truck. (Check your local laws if you're contemplating doing this yourself.)
Posted Jul 24th 2008 7:00AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: laptops hacks, daily
[Mark] sent in this nice trick for
breathing new life into an old laptop. [Sarc] had a tibook with a broken LCD. It was still usable with an external monitor, so he simply removed the broken LCD. The tibook (and MacBook) uses a magnetic sensor to monitor the LCD position. To put the machine in the right mode, he taped a magnet in place to make the machine think that the display was in the closed position. To really clean things up, he mounted all the hardware under the desk and used a wireless keyboard and mouse with the machine.
Posted Jul 23rd 2008 7:47AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: daily, digital audio hacks
There's an
interesting thread discussing mods to improve the inexpensive Oppo 980 DVD player for better performance. The power supply, capacitors and opamps can benefit from some higher end components. [Occam] suggests several replacement opamps options for upgrading the audio output. The realatively low cost of Oppo gear makes it a better risk than modding a multi-thousand dollar DVD player.
Posted Jul 22nd 2008 7:46AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: misc hacks, daily
[David] put together this rather nice
1-wire barometer. An MPX4115 measures the pressure while an SMD DS2438 mounted to an 8 pin DIP socket provides the 1-wire interface. The writeup includes a nice description of the board layout and wiring, making this project accessible to just about anyone with a decent tip on their soldering iron.
Posted Jul 21st 2008 8:52AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: misc hacks, home hacks, daily
We're used to central A/C, so we were surprised by
this PIC controller based heater controller. It's based around a pump controlled boiler/radiator system. A PIC 16F84 is used to input the set point and control a pump to circulate the heated water as needed. You can grab full schematics on the
project page.
Update: We added a screen capture of the schematic after the break since the site keeled over.
Continue reading PIC based boiler controller
Posted Jul 20th 2008 7:28AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: home hacks, daily
[BahaTanju] sent in this oh so simple
fish feeder. It's a mechanical light timer with a simple dispensing bottle mounted to the rotating time wheel. As the timer rotates, food is dispensed and the aquarium light is activated. If you have bigger fish, you could adapt this to work on a solenoid and use a timer with multiple on/off settings.
Posted Jul 19th 2008 7:46AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: home entertainment hacks, daily
USB NES controllers are old school these days, but [Jay] put together a
nice new take on the project. He shoehorned a USB interface adapter, USB hub and a USB memory stick to store his collection of NES roms and emulators right on the controller. He even dug up a black USB cable to keep the original look of the controller. Now he can just plug in and load his game selection directly from the controller.
Posted Jul 18th 2008 5:48PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: cons
While Defcon badges have taken on the habit of being hackable electronics,
The Last Hope badge is taking a new shape this year. It's dubbed the
Attendee Meta-Data project (AMD for short). Aside from the tombstonian dimensions, it features a trackable RFID tag that's going to be used to create a different sort of conference experience.
Sure, the creators might use the badges to make sure they meet all the lovely ladies in attendance, but the idea is to use the data to improve the conference experience for everyone. Attendees have the ability to add tags indicating their interests. Combine that data with actual location tracking and people can now network and interact based on what and who they're looking for. It's social networking coming full circle to include actual socializing.
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