Bathroom fan that switches itself on when it gets steamy or smelly

At first we thought that [Brandon Dunson] was writing in to tell us he’s too lazy to fix his bathroom fan. What he really meant is that simply replacing the unit isn’t nearly enough fun. Instead, he developed his own bathroom fan trigger based on stinky or humid air conditions. He didn’t publish a post about the project but we’ve … Read the rest

Raspberry Pi reaches critical mass as XBMC hardware

For years I’ve been dreaming of a streaming media device that could just be stuck to the back of a television. Since XBMC has been far and away my favorite set-top box software, I’ve closely monitored hardware developments that can run that package. Now I think it’s time to declare that the Raspberry Pi has achieved the base specifications to … Read the rest

MSP430 Launchpad Game of Life shield

[100uf] built an LED matrix shield for the MSP430 launchpad. His goal with this design was to have it play Conway’s Game of Life. It does just that, as you can see in the clip after the break. But it’s just waiting to learn some more tricks. After he tires of watching the cellular automaton he can try his … Read the rest

Tearing down the Wii U

With the release of the Wii U last weekend we knew it wouldn’t be long before we saw those glorious gut shots on the Internet. The folks at iFixit have torn down a Wii U, and the insides look somewhat promising for a potential hack to take control of the Wii U Game Pad.

The components in the Wii Read the rest

Optimizing your electronics projects with a camera

What do you do when you have a microcontroller you’re trying to optimize? One method is using a debugger, but for AVRs and such that’s not a very common technique. For lower-level electronics projects, it’s nearly impossible, even. [Cnlohr] built a small Minecraft server that listens to in-game redstone circuits, but the performance of his real-world to block-world bridge wasn’t … Read the rest

How to build OpenOCD with Stellaris Launchpad support

The stable version of OpenOCD (an open source On-Chip Debugging software package) doesn’t have support for the ICDI protocol used by the Stellaris Launchpad board. But it is pretty easy to build your own OpenOCD from source after patching it to use the protocol.

We’ve already seen an open source tool used to flash binary images to the TI Read the rest

Launch day Wii U homebrew is very encouraging

With the launch of the Wii U yesterday, we were wondering exactly how long it would take for this new console to be broken wide open allowing for the execution of homebrew code. Technically, it only took a day, as [wraggster] shows us, but the results aren’t what you would expect. Right now, he’s using methods meant for the … Read the rest