Ninja Networks Party Badge

ninjabadge

UPDATE: The director’s cut of the story

While coverage of the official Defcon badge has been pretty heavy, there was a badge that was far more exclusive and talked about way more. For the last ten years at Defcon a group of hackers known as Ninja Networks hosted an invitation-only party for selected attendees. For the 2009 event, [cstone] and … Read the rest

Neo Geo mini arcade

neopocket

[Pocket Lucho], the builder of mini arcade cabinets, is back with another build. This time it’s a miniature Neo Geo arcade machine (translated). The build is very compact and neat. He attached the control panel and the PS one display using magnets to make the wiring more accessible. It has video out and second player input too. … Read the rest

Tiny bluetooth teardown

minibluetooth

The folks at SparkFun were startled by how small USB bluetooth adapters had become so they split one open. They noted a few interesting design features. It has a small folded trace antenna on the board edge. The metal USB housing acts as the RF shield. The bluetooth IC is an AS3620QA. Now we wonder what those tiny Buffalo Read the rest

Giant bulb VU meter

bulb

The latest Inventgeek project is a 12 outlet control box. They decided to demo it using a giant bulb based VU meter. The control box has 12 individual outlets hooked up to two layers of six solid state relays. [Jared] notes that SSRs can be very expensive, but he purchased his on eBay for ~$10 each. Wiring and installation … Read the rest

OmniDirectional Research Platform

[Shachar Geiger] sent in an interesting project that he worked on with [Tal Avivi] at the Bezalel academy in Jerusalem. They were given the task of designing a 1-person electrical urban vehicle. They took some cues from MIT’s Transology and designed the OmniDirectional Research Platform (ODRi). There’s a video of it embedded above. It can be driven using three … Read the rest

Thank you Ian Lesnet

A little over a year ago [Ian Lesnet] joined our hacking team and began cranking out some of the best original how-tos Hack a Day has ever offered. You may remember our popular web server on a business card from last fall and we’re sure everyone is familiar with the Bus Pirate (yes, they’re still on schedule).

It’s a … Read the rest

Black Hat 2009: Parking meter hacking

meter

For day two of Black Hat, we sat in on on [Joe Grand], [Jacob Appelbaum], and [Chris Tarnovsky]‘s study of the electronic parking meter industry. They decided to study parking meters because they are available everywhere, but rarely considered from a security perspective.… Read the rest