When [Barret] went to use his camera the other day it kept shutting down on him, and upon inspecting the battery, he found that it was a bit swollen. Knowing that he needed a replacement, he turned to an aftermarket battery he had sitting around, but grew pretty annoyed when his Sony Cybershot camera would not accept it.

Apparently a recent firmware update causes his camera to reject non-Sony batteries, a situation he describes as “battery DRM”. There was no way he was going to pony up another $50 to Sony instead of using the perfectly good $10 battery he already had, so he decided to rectify the issue himself.

He stripped both batteries of their plastic coatings, revealing the lithium cells and their charging circuits. He desoldered the PCB from his Sony battery, transplanting it to his aftermarket battery after a little bit of trimming. He wrapped everything up with some tape and gave his franken-battery a spin. It worked a treat, and he was so satisfied with it that he did a similar swap in his aging Logitech mouse.

As more and more companies lock competitors out of the user-replaceable consumables market, these sorts of hacks are certain to become more and more prevalent.

[Daniel] just made a motion controlled game controller to go with his infuriating game. Thankfully, [Daniel] posted the source for this game so first time players already know the level select codes.

The controller is based on an Arduino Uno with what looks to be a Sparkfun 2-axis accelerometer providing the tilt sensing. A similarly sourced half-inch force sensitive resistor and temperature sensor control the ‘jump pads’ in the game. A small vibrating pager motor strapped onto the controller as a rumble pack.

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[Fabien Royer] has been playing around with Netduinos and he just came up with a really awesome project that will display the time and social media popularity. It’s a very nice build, and we’d guess that his social media influence is going to go up very shortly.

Klout is a service that connects to your Facebook or Twitter profile and tells you how much influence you have on a scale of 1 to 100 (possibly 10 to 100. see this). To build the Klout Klock [Fabian] used a Netduino Plus, a good choice because of the integrated ethernet port. The Netduino connects to the Klout API to either satiate vanity or admit prestige. The display is an adafruit TFT screen.

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[Nathan] had an small router kicking around and thought that he might as well put it to good use. He had always been interested in getting a better handle on his espresso machine, and figured that the router would be a perfect Linux-based PID controller.

He installed OpenWRT on the router, then disassembled it in order to get access to the router’s GPIO pins. He built a small PCB that allows him to get temperature info from the machine to the router using i2c. [Nathan] put together a PID package for OpenWRT, allowing him to control the machine over SSH, though he may build in a user-friendly web interface sometime in the future.

He says that most espresso machine PID controllers he has seen come in the form of big ugly boxes slapped on the side of the machine’s case, though we have to disagree with him on that point. Opinions aside, he is going for a minimalist design, and while he says that he is only about half way through the project, we think things are looking promising so far.

When everything is said and done, we hope to get a much closer look at all of his code, schematics, and more information on the router he used as well.

When we first covered [Markus]‘ portable SID player we starting dreaming about an alternative universe circa 1987 that included a pocket-sized music player called the Commodore ePod. [Markus]‘ updated firmware that connects his SID player to a PC will have to do for now, we suppose.

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Feeling pretty good after putting together your brand new standing computer desk? Step aside please, [Kagen Schaefer] has something he’d like to show you.

His Pipe Organ Desk is undoubtedly one of the coolest pieces of furniture we have seen in a long time. The project took [Kagen] over three years to complete, which sounds about right once you see how much attention was put into every last detail.

This desk is amazing in several ways. First off, the entire desk was constructed solely from wood. The drawers, the supports, knobs, screws, and even the air valves – all wood. Secondly, when one of the desk’s drawers are pushed in, air is directed to the organ pipes at the front of the desk, which plays a note.

A small portion of the air is also directed into the desk’s pneumatic logic board, which keeps track of each note that has been played. When someone manages to play the correct tune, a secret compartment is unlocked. The pneumatic logic board is an unbelievable creation, consisting of well over 100 wooden screws which can be tuned to recognize any number of “secret tunes”.

Sure a well-placed axe can open the compartment too, but who would destroy such a fine piece of work?

[via Make]

The next time you set off for a long day in the coal mines, forget the canary – bring your Roomba along instead!

While we are pretty sure that canaries are no longer used in the mining industry, this Roomba hack could make a suitable replacement if they were. A team from the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS) recently showed off a Roomba which they modified to test an area’s air quality. Using an Arduino and a volatile organic chemical (VOC) detecting air quality sensor, the Roomba goes about its normal business, lighting an LED any time it encounters overly contaminated air. When captured via a long exposure image, the process creates a “bad air” map of sorts, with the polluted areas highlighted by the glow of the LED.

While the Roomba currently only detects VOCs, the team plans on adding additional sensors in the near future to expand its functionality. The Roomba is merely a proof of concept at the moment, but we imagine that similar technology will be adapted for use in unmanned explorations of chemically hostile environments, if that hasn’t happened already.

[via DVice] [Image via TechnologyReview]

Here’s an Arduino library that will let you drive a very large number of LEDs. [Elco Jacobs], an electrical engineering student, is the author of the library. He has a work-study job that has him helping out others with their electrical projects and he was constantly being solicited for methods to control droves of light emitting diodes. This was the motivation that led him to produce the dazzling 16 RGB LED example seen in the video after the break.

His setup doesn’t use expensive LED drivers, but instead utilizes 595 shift registers which are both common and cheap. He calculates that it is possible to control up to 96 of these shift registers, each driving 8 LEDs, with reasonably satisfying results. This is thanks to his well-optimized code that manages to drive the clock pin of the registers at 1.33 MHz. This optimization is done by writing each command in assembly, which allows him to precisely count the cycles. Each individual pin takes 12-13 cycles to address, totally 9984 cycles at worst when addressing the maximum number of outputs.

[Elco] thinks this is as fast as he can make the routine run, but he is asking for help with testing. If you think you know how to squeeze out a few more cycles, make sure you join in on his forum thread.

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