Homemade tank joins the battle in Syria

syrian-home-made-tank

What does a hacker do when going into battle for the freedom of their country? He builds a tank from scratch, of course. It’s a little bit of a stretch calling it a tank as it lacks treads. But it’s got a high-caliber gun mounted on top and has been heavily armored.

There is room enough inside for two … Read the rest

Web scraping tutorial

web-scraping-tutorial

Web scraping is the act of programmatically harvesting data from a webpage. It consists of finding a way to format the URLs to pages containing useful information, and then parsing the DOM tree to get at the data. It’s a bit finicky, but our experience is that this is easier than it sounds. That’s especially true if you take some Read the rest

OLED name badge with rechargeable LiPo cell

oleduino-name-badge

Here’s a project that let [Rick Pannen] try his hand with an OLED display and a rechargeable power source. He calls it OLEDuino which is a mashup of the display type and the Arduino compatible chip running the whole thing. He figures it will serve nicely as a geeky name badge but also ported a Breakout type game to … Read the rest

Simulating CRT or Vector displays for more realistic emulation

simulated-crt-monitor-for-emulatorsScaled down it’s not as obvious that this image isn’t a crystal clear rendering of Mortal Kombat gameplay. But we’ve linked it to the full size version (just click on the image) so that you can get a better look. Notice the scan lines? This is the result of an effort to more accurately mimic the original hardware displays used … Read the rest

Transmit FM using Raspberry Pi and no additional hardware

rpi-fm-transmitter

Now here’s a project that actually hacks the Rapsberry Pi rather than just using it as an embedded computer. [Londons Explorer] figured out how to turn the RPi into an FM transmitter. For now it’s done entirely in the user space, but we’re sure it could be improved if someone wanted to drill down further into the hardware. For … Read the rest

Morse Code Transceiver Based on Gameboy Color Camera

Morse Code IR Transceivers

For their final project in a microcontrollers course, [Trudy] and [Josh] designed a pair of morse code transceivers. To send the message, they used an array of IR LEDs. The message is received using a Gameboy Color Camera, which takes care of basic image processing. This allows a 8-bit ATMega1284p microcontroller to handle transmitting and receiving messages.

The transmission … Read the rest

An automat of wireless 3D printers

vending

There’s a lot of really cool 3D printer stuff happening in the fashion district of NYC this month. It’s called 3DEA, and shows off  the awesomeness of Shapeways, Ultimaker, and the Up! 3D printer to all the fashionistas, trend setters, and the caliphate of coolness that is midtown Manhattan. The folks at Ultimaker wanted to bring something awesome to this … Read the rest