Garage door monitoring and control using a dedicated Android phone

[Sean] happened to have an extra Android phone sitting around and wanted to see what type of home automation he could use it for. One simple hardware modification, and some apps from the Android Market let him monitor and control his garage door remotely.

The hardware modification is a hack we’ve already looked at. The BTmate uses a Bluetooth … Read the rest

Send a satellite into space for $300

There’s a new Kickstarter campaign that promises to launch a personalized satellite into orbit for 300 bones.

The KickSat project is headed by [Zac Manchester], [Mason Peck], [Justin Atchison] and a few more contributors hailing from Cornell University. Their goal is to launch a CubeSat filled with hundreds of postage stamp-sized satellites and release these ‘Sprites’ into low Earth orbit.… Read the rest

Simple hack reuses an air freshener PIR sensor

pir_sensor_room_greeter

A year ago [Lochie] bought an Airwick automatic air freshener, and while he thought it was a cool gadget, the freshening spray and the novelty ran out in short order. The device collected dust in his room for some a while until he recently unearthed it, and noticed that a perfectly good PIR sensor was looking him in the … Read the rest

PlayStation 3 controller made fully remappable

[Hazer] managed to take a PlayStation 3 SixAxis controller and modify it so that all of the buttons can be remapped in hardware. Aside from this being really cool, he had a good reason for doing it. Regular readers should remember the feature regarding [Chuck Bittner's] internet petition calling for button mapping as a feature in all games. … Read the rest

This cube of playroom drawers is quite puzzling

If you’re looking for a piece of custom furniture to anchor your child’s playroom, this Rubik’s cube chest of drawers is just the thing. [Makendo] went the extra couple of miles on the project, building the entire thing from scratch and adding one clever feature after another to make it something special.

It’s made up of three plywood boxes, open … Read the rest

See where Socks has been using a GPS tracking collar

[Buxtronix] wanted to know where his cat (named Ash, but we thought Socks sounded much more cliché) was going when on the loose. He designed a GPS tracking collar and a way to map the data it collects.

The hardware actually turns out to be very simple. He needed a GPS module to gather location data, and a way … Read the rest

Announcing our next theme: Halloween hacks

It seems every year, Hack A Day is a little bit behind the times when it comes to Halloween hacks. Builds like the Mario costumes and the house singing Thriller are great, but it makes a lot more sense for us to post them before Halloween.

To introduce our Halloween theme, we’d like to present [heavyweighthowe]‘s Halloween project. It’s … Read the rest