Multitouch patched into Android

[Luke Hutchison] has come up with a rather clever hack to get multitouch support on the G1. He wrote a patch against the Synaptics touchscreen driver. When two fingers are placed, the driver reports the x/y of the midpoint and a radius for the size field. If only one finger is used, the size is reported as zero. The nice thing about this approach is that it's backwards compatible; the extra data … [Read more...]

Automated protocol analysis

wireshark

[I)ruid] from BreakingPoint Labs has been doing quite a bit of protocol reverse engineering as part of his work. He put together a post covering some of the tools that have been useful for this task. Text-based protocols have a lot of human readable characters that can help you identify fields. Binary protocols don't have this luxury though. He recommends the Protocol Informatics Project for … [Read more...]

Rickshaw pulling robot

rickshaw

[Wu Yulu] is a Chinese farmer with no formal mechanical training. He's been building various contraptions over the years and even accidentally burned down his house at one point. Pictured above is a walking, talking rickshaw pulling robot he built to haul himself around town. You can see a video of the mechanical man on Reuters. The design reminds us of [Bob Schneeveis]' Schwarzenegger towed … [Read more...]

A history of SparkFun prototypes

sparkfuntoys

If you haven't checked out SparkFun Electronics' prototype collection yet, you're missing out. They unearthed many of their old prototypes and published them to show what kind of mistakes could be made. You'll see plenty of errors and get hints on what to look for while developing your own hardware. This pairs well with their Design for Manufacture post. Along with the pile of broken board … [Read more...]

Hand made triode

vac

[Claude Paillard] makes his own triodes (google translated) for short wave radios. The site doesn't have a lot of details itself, but links to entire books on the history of radio tubes and manufacturing of them.  [Claude] takes us through the entire process of building a triode in a 17 minute long video. Even if you aren't into them, this is fascinating. From the looks of it, several of us might … [Read more...]