Upgrading a voice recorder with a hex editor

[Alex] just bought a really nice TEAC VR-20 audio recorder, a very capable recorder perfect for recording your thoughts or just making concert bootlegs. This model was recently replaced by the Tascam DR-08 audio recorder. It’s essentially the same thing, but the Tascam unit can record at 96kHz, whereas the TEAC can only record at 48kHz. [Alex] figured out a … Read the rest

The ultimate low-cost dev board

We see a lot of microcontroller dev boards here at Hackaday, so much that we’re jokingly considering changing our name to Board a Day. These devices – from Arduinos to Arduino-compatible boards, very, very small boards, to extremely powerful ARM devices – are a great way to learn about the wonders of controlling electricity with code. There’s a problem, though: … Read the rest

Heat-seeking firebot drowns out the flames

This robot can find and extinguish fires automatically. It is the culmination of an Embedded Design class project from last school year. [Dan] and his classmates developed a turret that holds both a spray nozzle and heat sensor which would be a fantastic building block for a real-life tower defense game.

The jewel of the sensor array is a TPA81 … Read the rest

Nikon WU-1a WiFi dongle hacking

Here’s a pretty tricky piece of consumer electronics reverse engineering. [Joe Fitz] came across the Nikon WU-1a. It’s a dongle that plugs into a Nikon D3200 camera, producing a WiFi connection which can be picked up and controlled from a smart phone. The app shows you the current image from the viewfinder, allows you to snap the picture, then pulls … Read the rest