Arduino based biofeedback unit

[Michael Gerstenmayer] has been very successful in developing a biofeedback system. He’s based the build around an Arduino and started adding different chunks to the project to develop a full-featured unit. It can take your temperature (with an IR sensor…. not the hard way), measure your galvanic skin response (conductance), and produce feedback based on this data. Interestingly enough, … Read the rest

PS3 controller spoofing advancing with leaps and bounds

Development has been progessing quite nicely on [Matlo's] PlayStation 3 controller spoofing project. This is a package that allows you to identify a PC as a PS3 controller. We know what you’re thinking: why would you want to do that? When we originally looked in on the project about a year ago we mentioned that this allows you to … Read the rest

Automated hose keeps cats from watering you

Commenter [TheCreator] reminded us of this fantastic video from [Craig Turner] who you may recognize from SBS’s Top Gear Australia Video Competition.  You see, [Craig] has been struggling for some time with the problem of neighborhood cats relieving themselves pretty much all over his stuff. Through surveillance he identified (and named) around 9 separate cats sauntering into his … Read the rest

Color object tracking with an 8-bit microcontroller

[Craig] sent in a link to this project which manages to implement color tracking on an 8-bit microcontroller at 60 frames per second. That’s some pretty incredible performance, but we’re also not talking about using a hobby-grade microcontroller. The C8051F360 is an ARM microcontroller with 100 MIPS throughput and with a system clock that can operate at up to … Read the rest

The ins and outs of Lithium-based battery packs

lithium_batteries

So, you’ve got your awesome project built and are ready to take it on the go, but how are you going to power it? You could use a couple alkaline cells or perhaps swipe a Litihium battery pack from some infrequently used portable device – however before you do that, why not check out what [Lady Ada] has to say Read the rest

Extracting secured firmware from Freescale Zigbee radios

decapped_MC13224

[Travis Goodspeed] recently tore down the Freescale MC13224 wireless radio chip in an effort to demonstrate how the device’s firmware could be read, even when locked down in “secure” mode. While you might not recognize the Freescale MC13224 radio by name alone, you are certainly familiar with some of its practical applications. Found in the QuahogCon and Ninja Party … Read the rest

Hacked phone runs Zork, gets lamp

A few months ago, [Ulysses] had a project in mind that would run Zork on a TDD. Although it was a bit of a struggle getting the project ready in time for the Bay Area Maker’s Faire, the accompanying build blog tells us it was more than worth the effort.

After hooking up the guts of the phone to an … Read the rest