SDR As A Police And Fire Radio Scanner

If you’ve lost interest in that DVB dongle you bought to give software defined radio a try you should bust it back out. [Harrison Sand] just finished a guide on how to use SDR to listen in on Police and Fire radio bands.

The project, which results in the crystal clear audio reception heard after the break, uses a whole lists of packages on a Windows box to access the emergency bands. SDRSharp, which has been popular with other DVB dongle hacks, handles the hardware work. In this case the dongle is a Newsky TV28T v2 module that he picked up for a few bucks. He’s also using some support programs including the Digital Speech Decoder which turns the data into audio.

We wonder how many areas this will work for. It was our understanding that law enforcement was moving to encrypted communications systems. But all we really know about it is that you can jam the system with a children’s toy.

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The 10 Best Hacking Videos

Say goodbye to the rest of your day. Here are the top 10 best videos about real hacking. We’ve already covered the absolute worst that hollywood has to offer, twice. Then, we did the best that hollywood could pull off. Now we’re enjoying the real thing. Feast your eyes on hacking as it actually happens. In this list are all kinds of hacking, from slapping things together out of scrap to lock picking. From creating computers in your garage to social engineering.

Most of these are even available, in full,  on youtube!

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Keurig Hack Runs A Water Supply Line To Your Coffee Maker

We were skeptical about Keurig machines when we first heard about them. Although we still scoff at the added waste of throwing away a plastic container of used grounds for each cup of coffee made, we tried one at the in-laws and it does brew a great cup of Joe. One of the draws of the machine is that it does it pretty much automatically as long as you fill it with water first. [Joseph Collins] is even taking the work out of that by adding a water supply line to his Keurig.

His coffee maker sits right next to the fridge, which has its own water supply. So one day he thought, why not run a line to the coffee maker as well? As far as plumbing projects go it’s very simple. He pulled out the refrigerator and added a T-fitting to split the water supply line. From there he ran an extension next to the coffee maker that terminates with a valve being pointed to by the arrow in the lower left. The plastic supply line leaving the valve passes through a rubber grommet in the lid of the water reservoir pointed to by the other arrow.

[Joseph] figures the whole project came in at under $30 and shows how he did it in the clip after the break.

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A Quick Tour Of My Workbench

Whenever I release a hackaday video, I invariably get comments and emails about my workbench. Some people are telling me to clean up, others are asking me about things they see in the background.

This isn’t just a set that I film on. Obviously my videos aren’t high enough quality for people to assume that either. This is my actual workbench, made and used by my grandfather.  I do enjoy keeping it decorated though. I try to keep a piece of as many past projects as possible hanging on my bench to serve not only as inspiration to me, but also as an interesting backdrop for the videos.

I make no attempts to hide my upcoming projects when I shoot videos. If you pay close enough attention, you can sometimes see projects appear on my bench in videos before the actual project video hits youtube.

I love my workbench. You should love yours too. Hey, maybe you could do a tour of it and post it on youtube for us to admire! Just try not to say “workbench” as many times in a row as I did.

Bending And Printing A Curved Camera Dolly Track

How lucky is [Transistor Man] that he found the materials for the tracks of this curved camera dolly just lying around the shop? The three rails making up the system are quarter-inch diameter and he was able to bend them by hand with the help of a 55 gallon drum. But to hold them in place so that the camera dolly would run smoothly he had to find a way to precisely space the tracks.

The robot arm you see in the picture above is a 3D printer which ended up being the easiest solution to the problem. With a bit of trial and error he found a design that holds the tracks in place without interfering with the camera sled’s progress. From there he devised a mounting system which uses three camera tripods to hold the track. You can see a test video shot from the dolly track embedded after the jump. It’s the opposite of the bullet time rigs [Caleb’s] been working on lately.

We figure the spacers would work for any track shape, but if you’re going for a complicated route you need some type of pipe bender to help out.

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