Name these parts: Verifone payment module tear down

[Jerzmacow] got his hands on this Verifone Vx570 handheld payment terminal at a flea market. It’s got a thermal printer, a magnetic card reader, and then there’s the big LCD screen and buttons. In other words, lots of parts for his hacking amusement. But first, he decided to take a look at the parts that went into the design. … Read the rest

Fixing that broken laptop power jack

It seems that there’s a whole range of Toshiba Satellite laptop computers that suffer from a power jack design that is prone to breaking. We see some good and some bad in this. The jack is not mounted to the circuit board, so if it gets jammed into the body like the one above it doesn’t hose the electronics. But … Read the rest

Seeing with another person’s eyes

We suppose they could just trade shoes, but that wouldn’t be a hack. [Timothy] wanted to design a team-building exercise at work, and he figured the best way to get some empathy would be to have people swap eyes. He calls his project eyeSwap and it is supposed to, “put the eye back in team.”

[Tim] found a few … Read the rest

Sparkfun announces Free Day 2012

We got word that it was coming, and now SparkFun has just announced that Free Day 2012 will take place on January 11th. This is the third time around for the purveyor of goodies for electronic enthusiasts. Each year the offer is a little different, but like in the past you stand to get $100 of free stuff!

The Read the rest

Reading inputs from shift registers using just one single pin

Here’s an interesting article about reading data from shift registers using less than three pins. 74HC165 shift registers are a popular choice for adding inputs to a microcontroller. They have a parallel input register which can be read using the latch, then shifted into a microcontroller via the data and clock pins. For those counting, that’s the three pins … Read the rest

Gif player does it using paper medium

Ditch that fancy wide-format LCD monitor and go back to the days when animation was made up of moving frames played back by a specialized device. [Pieterjan Grandry] built this gif player which does just that. The frames of the animation are printed on a paper disk. When spun and viewed through a looking hole the same size as one … Read the rest

Adventures in resurrecting a no-name IP webcam

webcam-repair

As many of us do, [Steaky] serves as a kind of on-call help desk for his family. His father in law recently contacted him because his pan and tilt webcam died, and he wanted to see if it could be fixed. Never turning down a challenge, [Steaky] decided to give it a shot.

He ended up having to disassemble … Read the rest