Cathode ray tube leads the way on this bot

[Daqq's] latest creation is this little robot with a CRT mounted on the front. Obviously ‘why?’ is the wrong question here, but we know this is right up his alley considering his propensity for the less common like this plasma ball Nixie tube. The solidly-built bot uses two stepper motor controlled wheels and an omni-wheel on the front … Read the rest

Composing music with the Force Trainer

In the ongoing quest to make the Force Trainer useful [Hunter Scott] developed a music composition platform for your mind (channel Jack Black’s voice for the last half of that sentence). Using the Force Trainer’s serial port [Hunter] feeds the data stream into a computer via an FTDI cable and uses Processing to make the music. It’s good, and the … Read the rest

Command line video processing using FOSS

[Daniel Paluska] is getting away from the point-and-click by editing videos from the command line. Using the free open source software packages FFmpeg, Imagemagick, and Sox he produces new clips from multiple videos with effects like overlaying, slicing, and assigning each video to a different quadrant. The last option would be useful for displaying different angled shots of the … Read the rest

Modern car data systems lack security

Tomorrow a team of researchers will present their paper on Experimental Security Analysis of a Modern Automobile (PDF) at the IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy. Much like the racing simulators we’ve seen they’re exploiting the ODB-II port to get at the vehicle’s Controller-area network, or CAN-bus. We’re not surprised at all that they can display custom text on … Read the rest

Super quick and cheap trackball

[Elgatoandaluz] has posted this guide on how to tear apart a standard optical mouse and build a custom trackball. He’s using a ping pong ball , mounted above the laser as the trackball itself, which seems like it would be a little lite, but functional. The case is scrap cardboard. We really like that you could toss this together … Read the rest