Fresh hacks every day
[Flowolf] added an auto-locking RFID entry system to his front door. He used our favorite fabrication system, acrylic and threaded rod (we also like to throw in aluminum angle bracket from time to time). The support structure mounts underneath the escutcheon plate for the lockset, keeping the main acrylic sheet flat against the door. An RFID reader and Arduino run the system, with a button … [Read more...]
Stepper motors are pretty easy to control with a microcontroller. But if you're looking to run then at a high number of revolutions per second things get tricky pretty quickly. [Uwe's] been learning about and building stepper drivers for years, and recently he decided to build a high-performance driver based on a MicroChip reference design. As with the reference design, his board uses a … [Read more...]
If you've gone to the trouble of building your own CNC mill we know you're always on the lookout for things to use it for. [Boris Landoni] wrote in with just the thing for the holiday season; a set of lighted acrylic Christmas ornaments. One of the interesting properties of acrylic is how it reacts when edge-lit. The material pipes the light, until it bounces off of a disturbance in the … [Read more...]
[John Boxall] took a different route for a single-input combination lock. This unit uses a Ping ultrasonic range finder to input a four digit code. It's a hardware upgrade, but uses the same basic concept as his button-based combo lock. That design used an Arduino to measure how long you hold down a single button, with a one second pause between inputs, to enter the code. This one also uses timing … [Read more...]
The Kindle Touch has been rooted! There's a proof video embedded after the break, but the best part about this discovery is that [Yifan Lu] wrote in-depth about how he discovered and exploited a security hole in the device. The process begins by getting a dump of the firmware. If you remove the case it's not hard to find the serial port on the board, which he did. But by that time someone else … [Read more...]
Tis the season for hacking, and [Nick McClanahan] at the GadgetGangster is certainly showing off his Christmas spirit with his most recent creation. He had an animatronic Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer toy sitting around and thought it would be fun to convert him into an email reading machine. He tore open the toy, removing its innards, disconnecting the built-in speaker and servos from the … [Read more...]
[Alex] sent in a neat Ikea DIODER build that controls strings of RGB LEDs with HTTP requests. We've seen Ikea DIODERs controlled wirelessly and over USB, but using the Internet with a DIODER is new to us. For his build, [Alex] used a Nanode, a small Arduino-like board that has built-in web connectivity. The hardware portion of the build is very simple. A MOSFET controls each LED strip on the … [Read more...]
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