Billy Bass with selectable clips

billy-bass-secret-santa

[Will] enjoys giving hacked items as Secret Santa gifts and this year he decided to augment a Billy Bass. These gag items have become a popular hack to use as a prop or to read your Twitter updates to you. Right of the bat he scrapped the original PCB and sent it to the gift's future recipient as if he were a kidnapper extorting a family. He then set to work replacing the guts with a pair of PIC … [Read more...]

NES console to cartridge security in depth

nes-cic

[Segher] has reverse engineered the hardware and command set for the NES CIC chips. These chips make up the security hardware that validates a cartridge to make sure it has been licensed by Nintendo. Only after authentication will the console's CIC chip stop reseting the hardware at 1 Hz. The was no hardware information available for these chips (go figure) so [Segher] had to do some sleuthing … [Read more...]

NXT hacks: tanks and heaters

nxt-hacks-tank-heater

Here's a double-dose of Lego NXT goodness; a robotic tank and an automatic aquarium heater. The image to the left is a robotic tank powered by the popular Lego Mindstorms NXT kit. The brains rest inside of a tube, including the controller brick, ultrasonic range finder, a gyroscope, and a compass. Two sets of treads surround each edge of the tube making us wonder which end is up? We've embedded … [Read more...]

Hey man, SSH to my guitar and setup the multitouch

misadigital-guitar

The Misa Digital Guitar is a digital music controller like we haven't seen before. The body, machined out of ABS, looks like a guitar. The player puts theirs hands in the same places you would on a guitar but the lack of strings make it something different. The left had manipulates inputs in the form of 144 sensors, six in each of the twenty-four fret positions. The right hand doesn't strum, … [Read more...]

SheevaPlug PBX

[Greg] has been working on a version of Debian/ FreePBX/ Asterisk for people to be able to drop onto a SheevaPlug. If you haven't seen it, the SheevaPlug is a tiny computer housed in a wall plug. They made some waves when they were announced last year, and we've spoken of them several times. [Greg] is offering up the operating system in a pre configured format for SD cards so you can just download … [Read more...]