Adding Internal Bluetooth To Your Tablet/laptop


This one reminds me of [sprite_tm]s keyboard light mod. [Jeff] modded a usb bluetooth module and mounted it internally on his tablet. He connected a small circuit to two the the stock buttons to buffer/de-bounce them to allow simultaneous pressing to activate/deactivate the module. (To add a delicious taste of irony, my bluetooth module was flaking on and off while I read and wrote this up.)

Handy Bench PSU’s


I thought everyone was going with cheap PC based power supplies(I did), but some people just have to take it to another level. [andrew] built this bench PSU with -12V, -15V, +5V, +12V, +15V, variable and one +35VDC unregulated output. He based it on this design, but added a few tweaks of his own.
Yes, Hack-A-Day took a bit of an unplanned hiatus on Saturday, but I’ll have some extra stuff for you this week as things return to normal. If you’ve got something interesting, use the tips line.

Blame Bluetooth

Saturday, somewhere in west virginia, the bluetooth card in my laptop keeled over. The result? No internet access in my car, so there was no Hack-a-day yesterday. I’m back online now, and I’ll try to dig up some extra stuff this week to get things back on track.

DIY Digital Voice Transceiver


[dk] sent in the DVX project. It’s a complete D-STAR implementation that’s built around a digital transceiver chip, an ATMEL mcu and a digital voice compression chip. Compared to most digital radio’s I’ve seen, this one is pretty simple. The really complex action lives in the main chips with a bunch of caps and resistors to support them. Watch out for Digikey’s pricing – it looks like a major gouge after looking at the tx/rx chips on Analog Device’s site. If you get them at a decent price, they could make great rf links for your projects. The link to the paper seems a bit broken, but here’s the correct one.

Voting Rom Swapped In 60 Seconds


It’s been a while since we had a voting machine hack, but this video that [Marcel van der Peijl] sent in not only reminds me of Real Genius, but makes a great point. Maybe one of these voting machine companies will wake up, bring some decent designs to a hacking con and get things right. These guys popped apart a machine and fully swapped the roms in 60 seconds. How’s that for stealing a vote?