(Disclaimer: A sticker for an event I organize is in the background of the photos, it’s not meant to be there as product placement.)

When you need a rigid, vibration-free chassis for your amplifier, look no further than a roasting pan. I’ve used cast cement for subwoofers, but using a cooking pan bolted to a heavy wooden chopping board is a cheap way to get a rigid surface on which to build audio gear. The amp circuitry used by [Mark] is not complex, but it gets the job done. The “oxygen free copper cable” and “pure silver wire” are not needed, just make sure you have a solid mechanical connection. In other words, just tin your wires, bend small “u” shapes at each end, hook them together, and apply solder to the heated ends. Alternatively, hold the ends of stranded wires parallel to each other and twist the ends together before tinning, then solder. Test everything with a multimeter while moving wire joints to make sure you have no weak connections. Now you won’t waste your money on hyped-up cabling materials.

Thanks to [Gio] (who seems to have some personal audio projects as well) for the tip.

[superlopez] sent in this detailed article (mirrored here and here) which describes how to build a GPS and GLONASS (the Russian version of GPS) receiver. The resulting device is gigantic compared to one of those tiny bluetooth USB GPS units, but the ability to build one’s own receiver is one of those post-apocalyptic skills I sure would like to have. The creator of the article [Matjaz Vidmar] aka [S53MV] also has pages on Packet-Radio (PKT) transceiver improvements (PKT gets my vote for the best post-apocalyptic technology, and the only believable technology featured in the Transformers movie), and a more sophisticated homemade frequency counter than the one featured earlier this summer.

In 2005 we featured a from-scratch GPS receiver as well, thought the project site seems to be down. If your GPS unit just needs a better antenna, check out [Will]‘s how-to from last year.

When you need something quietly bending or moving, don’t underestimate SMA’s (or Shape Memory Alloys). The Living Glass project by architects [David Benjamin] and [Soo-in Yang] catalogs an experiment in building interactive, flexible, “breathing”, walls out of SMA wire and microcontrollers. Although they use Basic Stamps, the project could easily be extended to more cost-effective microcontrollers for large surfaces. The project is well documented with videos (AVI) of each prototyping step and even includes the ideas that were ultimately scrapped. Even if you don’t build a wall of interactive gills, this project should give you plenty of ideas for uses of SMA wire embedded in semi-flexible materials.

The e-textile construction kit by [Leah Buechley] consists of stitch-able sensors and microcontrollers. Stitch-able refers to the fact that these parts can be sewn with a needle and thread into wearable clothing or other fabric-based housings. A paper (PDF) on the e-textile construction kit project contains the first version. The second version of the e-textile construction kit, the LilyPad Arduino, is available this month through SparkFun’s site. Especially interesting are her instructions for modifying the clock speed on the Arduino to make it suitable for battery powered wearables.

We’ve covered [Leah Buechley]‘s work twice in 2005 for her wearable led matrix work.

Update: [Leah] updated her site since we posted this and added this new how-to.

The OpenBeacon project is an open source hardware and software active RFID device. OpenBeacon tags consist of 2.4GHz transceivers and a PIC16F684. One use of the project was to create CCC Sputnik to show the downsides to information culled using data mining from large tracking systems. People who chose to participate and wear the Sputnik tags did so voluntarily to create a database of material for further study. The hardware schematics (PDF) for the first version tags as well as the firmware for all versions has been released. Further creative uses of the OpenBeacon project are strongly encouraged.

As a reminder, the 24C3, the 24th Chaos Communication Congress, call for participation ends on October 12th. The theme this year encompasses all hardware projects and more specifically, steampunk themed submissions. Check out the CCC events blog for more information.

If you are curious about reading all the bits on a DVD, [tmbinc] has devised a hardware hack that uses a Pioneer DVD drive with leads soldered onto it and a Cypress FX2 microcontroller board to grab the flow of bits and push them over USB2.0. My favorite part of this tutorial is when you slow the spinning DVD down very slightly with your finger with a scope hooked up over what you believe to be the raw data stream from the disk. If the data rate slows when you physically slow down the disk, you probably are grabbing data from the correct pin. [tmbinc] even put together a software tool to process the resulting raw DVD data.

Figuring out the JTAG pinout on a device turns out to be the most time consuming hardware portion of many hacks. [hunz] started a project called JTAG Finder to automatically detect the JTAG pinouts on arbitrary devices using an 8bit AVR ATmega16/32L microcontroller. Check out the slides (PDF) from the talk as they break down how one finds JTAG ports on an arbitrary device, with or without a pinout detection tool. [hunz] is looking for people to pick up the project where he left off.

Once you determine the correct pinout, you will need a JTAG cable: there are two main types, buffered and unbuffered, both of which I have soldered up and tested from these circuit diagrams (image of completed buffered cable here). The software most hardware people use today are the openwince JTAG Tools. To get the JTAG Tools to compile, grab the latest source directly from their CVS repository.

The last time we featured JTAG was with regards to Linksys devices, but the tools listed above can be applied to any device with JTAG.

The Fnordlicht is a color mixing LED platform with free hardware schematics and open source firmware initially started by [fd0]. The system is dynamically controllable (via RS-485) and can also work as a standalone with pre-loaded color mixing. I have one of these soldered up and working at home; the circuits come in a stack of three boards with an optional serial level shifter board add-on. There are project pages in German about the Fnordlicht as well, which include some photos of the first prototype. Full kits (“Fnordlicht Bausatz” means “Fnordlicht kit”) and printed circuit boards (“Fnordlicht Platinensatz ohne Bauteile” means “Fnordlicht circuit board set without parts”) can be purchased from their shop, but be sure to ask them first about shipping prices to your location. I love this project, I fire it up and stick it in a corner of my hack room to add some color-changing atmosphere.

A while ago [Eliot] covered the MoMolight, a color changing led project controlled by the colors playing on your monitor.

First up on day 10 was I See Airplanes!, Eric Blossom’s excellent speech on creating hardware for making homebrew radars and software using the GnuRadio project. He uses bistatic passive receivers in the 100 MHz range doing object detection using other peoples’ transmitters. The project has a lot yet to accomplish including the use of helical filters (if there are any antenna freaks reading this, contact Eric, he’s looking for a bit of help).

Next on the third day we attended Ilja van Sprundel‘s huge fuzzing  extravaganza. Fuzzers generate bad data that is designed to look like good data and will hopefully break something in an interesting way. Our fav part? When the list of irc clients broken by his ircfuzz tool was so long he had to use 10pt font to get it all on one slide (see slide 53)! His paper can be found here and the slides here.

We then wandered to Harald Welte‘s talk on hacking the Motorola EZX series phones (which we’ve reported on here before). In case you forgot, the EZX series has a linux kernel. Incidentally the phone runs lots of stuff it really doesn’t need (like glibc, 6 threads for just sound processes, and even inetd). He presented the project for the first time in an official context since we saw him at 0Sec in October. Apparently lots of kinks have been worked out and there’s an official code source tree here.

The clincher for day 11 was FX and FtR of Phenoelit‘s semi-controversial talk on Blackberry security (covering both handheld devices and server based RIM products). This talk was a bit of a wake up call for RIM and thus the slides are still not available online so keep a sharp eye out for the video when it’s released by the CCC.

Also available from the CCC are the full proceedings in a downloadable pdf (also available in paper format for you physical-space-doodle-in-the-margin freaks).

We commence our tour with Hack-A-Day’s friend Dan “I Like Big Graphs and I Cannot Lie” Kaminsky. Dan presented yummy OpenGL graphics and DNS cache proof of the Sony Rootkit around the world. He also released Xovi, a tool which allows you to do network visualizations in realtime. Realtime: we dig it.

Next on to fun scanning of 3G wireless networks! The team of btk and ahzf presented a rather thorough intro to GPRS/UMTS packet theory (we use the term theory rather concretely here because packet loss and lag are rampant on cellphone based data networks all over the world). Slides for the talk in PDF format are here. They showed how to circumvent packet filtering / port filtering / data type filtering on data networks. This can be extremely useful when trying to run VoIP applications over a cellphone network since they are usually blocked.

Also of note was the talk on IrDA hotel system hacking presented by Major Malfunction. Which we mentioned when we were at Toorcon.

We’ll be here all week reporting on the coolest hardware hack topics at the conference from talks to Blinkenlights. If you’re here, drop us a line in the comments!

We’ve posted Part Two of the Magic Phone How-To over at Engadget. In this Installment, we show you the process behind creating the custom circuit that will live inside the rotary phone. This circuit is as small as possible by making it two-sided and by using surface mount components. Part One of the How-To covered number pad matrix decoding on just about any phone or number pad.