Fresh hacks every day
If you are curious about reading all the bits on a DVD, [tmbinc] has devised a hardware hack that uses a Pioneer DVD drive with leads soldered onto it and a Cypress FX2 microcontroller board to grab the flow of bits and push them over USB2.0. My favorite part of this tutorial is when you slow the spinning DVD down … Read the rest
Figuring out the JTAG pinout on a device turns out to be the most time consuming hardware portion of many hacks. [hunz] started a project called JTAG Finder to automatically detect the JTAG pinouts on arbitrary devices using an 8bit AVR ATmega16/32L microcontroller. Check out the slides (PDF) from the talk as they break down how one finds JTAG ports … Read the rest
While [Will] goes and hides in his offshore datashelter, Hack-A-Day is happy to welcome back our veteran foreign correspondent [fbz]. She promises future posts will have far less ‘German by example’. -[Eliot]
The Fnordlicht is a color mixing LED platform with free hardware schematics and open source firmware initially started by [fd0]. The system is dynamically controllable (via RS-485) … Read the rest
[lekernel] sent in his USB logic analyzer. I might just have to build this one for my work bench. It’s based on an Altera Cyclone 2 FPGA and he’s provided full schematics, source and a quick and dirty Linux driver to get things going. The board is nearly all surface mount, but he points out that the entire thing was … Read the rest
We’ve covered a few tesla coils, but somehow we never hit this classic – making your own jacobs ladder. The spark climbing the increasing gap between a pair of electrodes is easy enough to create – just get a high voltage transformer (like a neon sign transformer), make a set of insulated electrodes and wire things up.
Now … Read the rest
[bodiby] was first to send in this New Scientist article about converting a DVD drive into a lab scanner. I did some digging and came up with the details. Here’s the paper describing the process and results. Here’s a basic schematic and description of the mod. A set of samples is placed onto a CDR. A photo sensor is used … Read the rest
I spent part of my weekend with some sort of stomach virus, so Eliot stepped in for me yesterday. I’m taking next week off, so we’ll have a special guest starting Friday – but I’m not revealing who just yet.
[Fickara] sent in his AVR interface(in Italian) for an Oregon Scientific remote weather station. Thanks to the AVR, data … Read the rest
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