Burning custom drum machine sound ROMs

alesis hr-16

The Alesis HR-16 was an inexpensive, easy-to-use MIDI drum machine from the early ’90s. [Burnkit2600] had a lot of experience circuit bending the HR-16 and decided to burn some custom sound ROMs for it. The HR-16 has two 32-pin ROMs that are conveniently socketed. He pulled the chips and dumped the image using an EPROM reader/writer. The ROM only contains … Read the rest

CCFL backlight replaced with white LEDs

jornada backlight

[Jeroen Domburg], one of our favorite hackers, has posted how to replace a cold cathode based backlight with white LEDs. He had recently purchased an HP Jornada 680 on eBay and the backlight was looking very pinkish. The Jornada has a QWERTY keyboard, CF slot, PCMCIA slot and can run Linux. Sounds like a pretty decent mini-terminal (now … Read the rest

Game Boy Advance MIDI interface

gba midi

[Avelino Herrera Morales] wrote in to tell us about his Game Boy Advance MIDI project. It’s pretty neat since it only takes two resistors and a link cable to use. The link cable has a slotted connector so you can use a chunk of protoboard to connect to the pins. He has software the does all of the MIDI … Read the rest

Reverse engineer your BIOS

wooden laptop

[th0mas] has a fun guide to modifying the boot image in your BIOS. This could very easily brick your laptop, but it’s interesting to see how it’s done. He starts by dumping the plain text strings. The magic number for bitmap format appears in the file so he copies a large chunk of data starting at that point. th0mas … Read the rest

3D video microscope

stereo microscope

Gerald Heine’s stereo microscope uses a field sequential method for generating 3D video. A CRT draws half the screen’s lines with each frame. So, if you send the video from two different cameras on alternating frames you can generate a 3D using shutter glasses. Gerald’s setup uses the sync signal from one camera to control the other. Both video signals … Read the rest

Metasploit running on a WRT

metasploit

The folks from See-Security have gotten the Metasploit Framework running on a Linksys WRTSL54GS. They were inspired after seeing the Hacker Pimps pen-testing firmware, which we’ve covered before. The Metasploit Framework is used to develop and execute exploit code against target machines. The See-Security team ran into trouble getting Metasploit running due to RAM limitations. This particular model … Read the rest

Remote controlled alarm clock

remote alarm

Not everyone can have a cute alarm clock that runs away from you like Clocky. Most just resolve to place the clock on the other end of the room so they have to get out of bed to switch it off. That’s what [ryan] had to do to get up in the morning. He wasn’t able to set the … Read the rest