this is the best podcast ever made. of course, i’m not completely impartial, so let us know what you think. grab your ipod, download the latest hackcast, and crank it.

what you’re in for

• halo hacking – vince interviews redbluefire from trickingit.com

• hackback – stories from your hackaday peers

• podcasting on your mac – itunes 4.9 support and why isn’t there a big record button in ichat?

• the wtf file – crazy emails we get

• dvd biometrics – copy protection at your fingertips

• fresh, home baked tunes

be heard in our next podcast

when you’re done with the best 25 minutes of auditory bliss you’ve ever experienced, join in on our next podcast. call 206.888.HACK and tell us a hacking story.  if you would like to do an interview, or if you can’t call the 206 area code, contact me via aim/ichat handle jmstriegel.

listen (25:15, 23.1mb, mp3)

after having problems with my old dsl router, i finally ordered and received the actiontec gt701-wg from qwest.  i believe this is what they are starting to distribute by default in my area, and i wouldn’t be surprised if these were to be found elsewhere as well.

the interesting thing about these new actiontec routers is that they run linux.  seatllewireless has a nice page describing the system, and people have already figured out how to build and install custom firmware on the device.

most people have a single static ip, so it would be sort of neat to have your dsl router run a small static web site.  you could always port forward, but it’s one less machine to worry about.  better yet, install ssh and use it as a tunneling server.  then you can open up your wireless network for your neighbors, but not broadcast your email in the clear.

have you done anything neat with your 701 or a different embedded linux router?  do you have any great ideas for what could be done with this system?  tell us about it in the comments area.

just think about how much energy you waste when you pound your heels into the ground while walking or jogging.  you exert a lot of effort fighting gravity to lift your foot and body from the ground, only to let gravity take over, allowing your body to fall forward onto your heel again and wear another layer from the sole of your sneaker.

the kind folks at the mit media lab decided to do something about this.  by placing a piezoelectric element or a rotary magnetic generator into the heel of your shoe, you can effectively recycle some of your strut and use it for a mobile device.

it’s like regenerative braking for your feet.

benheck’s portables:
atari 2600 vagabond 2000
atari 2600 mass produciton prototype (phoenix)
playstation 2 portable
n64 portable

other portable conversions:
another cool n64 portable
ladyada’s gamegrrl

extend your portable:
ultimate gba game console
gameboy advance gps
gba robotics kits

softhacking:
gameboy programming
gba programming
ds programming

and, of course:
hackaday on your playstation portable
you can use our psp portal here

benjamin heckendorn of portable playstation 2 fame has been working on a prototype for a mass produced portable atari 2600, code named ‘phoenix’.

it has a 3.5″ screen, takes 6 aa batteries, uses standard atari game cartridges, and will someday allow me to play hours and hours of joust and moon patrol on international flights.

ben recently started a phoenix blog to help us stay on top of the latest phoenix development news.  thanks for the tip jesse!

the ‘mars rover‘ is a telepresence robot made by robo-hobbiest kerwin lumpkins.  he created it as a mock up of the real mars rover, but on a more down-to-earth scale.

controlling the tank is a general purpose robotics development board, also designed by kerwin.  the darc board takes input from infrared and sonar sensors, controls locomotion and camera aim, and has basic ability to make decisions based on a combination of its immediate environment and operator commands which are sent to the robot over a rf modem connection.

here’s what makes this cool.  if the robot detects that a given command would place in in jeopardy (such as running into a kitchen cabinet) it will abort and send back a warning to the control station.

to better simulate a real mars rover system, kerwin uses some tivo-like time shift software to delay the incoming video signal 5 seconds.  this makes controling the rover more difficult and is why onboard decision making is a must for your own martian explorer project.

wow, such heated debate!  the fox blocker is what’s called a band-stop filter.  you can make your own and block whichever cable frequency you wish.

sidenote: in the old days, cable companies would screw a few of these on your line to block premium channels that you hadn’t paid for.  good samaritans would occasionally crack open the cable box and remove all the filters for everyone on their block.

i thought the band-stop filter post was a nice juxtaposition to yesterday’s amp, but that’s just me.  if you are more interested in making things louder, the chu moy amp circuit used in two of our previous posts might be a good place to start for your dreamcast amp guts:
portable minty amp
covert desk lamp mic

jim younkin, shufflephones inventor, has started a new site devoted to shuffle hacking.  read my article on safely disassembling a shuffle and get to work.  we could all use a good shuffle hack now and then.

picture of a paper shuffle case [trilly]
oragami 35mm slide adapter for your scanner [paul]
help put linux on the playstation portable
follow linux development on the nitendo ds
tivo your favorite news program for your psp
more tivo hacks [david gould]
take your psp apart
ebooks on your psp [david the link machine]

last, but not least: a giant, eight foot nes controller

ah, fresh hackaday links – i’ve missed you so.

i’d like to a send a big shout out to our new hackaday conspirator, vince.  with this new hackaday upgrade, you can expect hackaday links more regularly, twice as many howtos and hackaday originals, and 50% of the posts will come with better humor.

vince will also be driving solo here for a little while once my wife gets her act together and decides to have our baby.  in case you are wondering, baby has no name yet – my best attempts (tron, neo, and project 2501) weren’t really well received

this site shows you how to jack in to the gps receiver inside any gm onstar system.  it’s as simple as soldering a up a serial cable.  you can then connect to it and either run some gps diagnostic software, or switch the device to nmea mode so that you can use it with your gps mapping software in your car pc.

if you’ve got an onstar system but aren’t paying for the service this might be just the hack for you.  thanks for the link leo!

i recieved an email from owen the other day:

fellow hackologists may be interested in a year and half long project of mine to build a computer controlled sheet metal cutting system. It uses a 100 watt CO2 industrial laser.

there are some videos on his site showing the co2 laser milling machine in action. it’s absolutely fantastic. just the control system itself is pretty intense. if you are interested in doing something like this, you should also check out his blog that chronicled the whole contruction.

i’m pretty sure i need one of these.

update: apparently i can’t spell (thanks pedant). i was thinking it was z for zippy.

the new psp game wipeout pure apparantly comes with a full featured web browser that is used to download updates.  normally it’s restricted for that purpose alone, but roto sent me a line this morning saying that it could be hacked to function as a general web browser with a little dns trickery.

just point the psp to a nameserver that you can control, make a dns entry for ingame.scea.com to go to your own webserver, and stick a /wipeout/index.html there.  when you hit download in wipeout, it will load up your custom page!

i’m told the browser supports javascript, so it wouldn’t be too hard to code up a quick address bar along with links to google, and (of course) your favorite site.

(thanks yuppicide for the link to the working mirror.  the author’s url is here but it’s currently down.)

update: just received some more detailed info from roto.  continue reading for more information.

from roto’s email:

Also here’s a summary of what I did (taken from the forum post):

Wipeout Pure for PSP has a feature that lets you access updated content online (such as grabbing new textures or levels). This little feature has been reversed and “exploited” to our benefit. Note I am NOT the first person to do this, nor have I ever claimed to be. I did however figure this out on my own (as did the 4 or so other people who’s links you can find on the forum posts).

Anyway, accessing the “Download” section in Wipeout brings us to a hidden but full-featured web browser which at this time is obscured by a “Coming Soon” logo from SCEA’s webservers.

Taking the access requests apart I figured out (like many other people did) that this can be exploited by simple “spoofing”

The way I loaded up my own “page” is by setting up my FreeBSD machine with some DNS entries that point ingame.scea.com and webcluster.scea.com and all NS’s for scea.com to my internal LAN machine. I also created some files for Apache to serve. So then I changed the PSP’s NameServer settings to point to the server on my local LAN (FreeBSD machine). When the Wipeout client accesses http://ingame.scea.com/wipeout/index.html it gets my LOCAL file because of the DNS mapping.  It’s all pretty simple after that. I made a static page with a bunch of spring-board (or portal-like I guess) links to access from the PSP. When you select “Go to home page” by pressing start it returns you to the portal site (index.html). So thats an easy way back.

While browsing, you can enter input (we googled stuff!), when you enter a textbox and press X the PSP pops up the Keyboard API (remember there’s alot of API to be taken advantage of with the PSP). After that its as simple as any other input on the PSP.

Browsing is simple enough, up and down to move from link to link. D-Pad only though. Also there is no cursor anywhere, and no title-bars. If there is no link in the nearest vicinity, the PSP just scrolls the page (awesome). Entering links is X, refresh page is []. Again entering text into boxes pops up the API.

JavaScript works (Again API for Alert boxes, NEAT feature…my friend MomDad gave me a scare with a “PANIC!” joke which turned out to be PSP’s Dialog box API kicking in), Java is yet to be tested. Frames don’t work. Large pictures are to be tested too. Uhm I think thats it for now. Most of HTML works (no H1′s and stuff). Background colors and pics etc work fine.

I’m attaching a huge HackADay pic just for you :) Love your site.

aww, shucks.  thanks roto!

in this article we’ll be exploring robot love.  i made a couple of simple lego mindstorms robots and programmed them to reproduce — i.e. they can swap code.  effectively, two robots come together, trade their genome, die, and two new robots are born in their place.

turn up the barry white.  get out your mindstorms.  let’s get it on.

genome

when i started working on this project, i had to make some initial decisions about how robot reproduction would actually work.  since they can’t create a new robot, their reproduction will have to function a little differently than what we are accustomed to.

what i wanted was some mechanism that would enable two parent robots to combine their software to produce two distinct child robots, which would replace their parents and exhibit new and unique behavior.

the robots i am using are simple two-wheel, two-sensor bots.  in these bots, the genome will serve to determine the behaviors of the robot’s normal life processes, namely:

• the robot’s primary execution loop

• what to do if the left sensor is hit

• what to do if the right sensor is hit

the genetic code determines what happens in each of these three tasks.  possible actions can be any combination of the following:

• go forward

• go backward

• turn left

• turn right

• attempt to reproduce

• do nothing

so a reasonable execution loop might be: forward, mate, forward, etc.

a left sensor loop might be: backward, right, right, etc.

getting it on

each of the three life processes has a fixed length.  when the robot is turned on, these are initialized to a very basic routine and most of the possible actions are filled with noops.

when a robot attempts to mate, it sends out a signal on the ir port.  if the other robot is able to see this signal, it will initiate a handshake to begin the genome transfer.  the parents trade one piece of a routine at a time, replacing their former actionwith the new child program.

in order to deter child generations from becoming lazy, i added a requirement that a certain number of movements had to occur between each successful mating before they could become ‘mature’ and capable of initiating the mating procedure.

evolution

when two robots reproduce, each recieves a copy of the other’s genetic code.  the outcome for each possible action for each life routine is a random choice between the two parent codes.  this alone would result in some pretty booring children, given that both parents are initialized with the same code, so i added a roughly 1 percent chance that a mutation will occur for each action that is copied.

the idea is that a robot which is better capable of maneuvering around without getting stuck will have a better chance of finding another robot and procreating.

unfortunately, i only have two robots at my disposal, but the results have still been really interesting.  all sorts of different behaviors have cropped up, from robots that drive in big circles and zig-zags,  to ones that always go in the same direction when they hit something.

extinction

in a small population, however, things don’t always work out for the best.  one of the robots pictured above mutated such that it didn’t turn when a sensor was hit.  the second robot managed to mate with it once, but then became plagued with the same genetic malfunction.  they were unable to get out of the corner and basically became extinct.

with a larger population, you would probably see fewer mass extinctions and more interesting group behavior.  with only two robots, they tend to have a nearly identical makeup in each generation.

one could imagine a larger colony breaking up into different classes — some robots that don’t move much and are easy to be found, and others that are good at wandering and spreading throughout the community.

if anyone out there has access to a bunch of mindstorms, give it a try and let us know about your results.

possible applications

aside from just being a simple and fun way to model life and evolution (not to mention a shameless title for an article), sex bots have some interesting potential applications.

robot optimization
when i released my robots for the first time, the software that i initialized them with was not ideally suited for the environment i placed them in.  occasionally they got hung up in corners, or moved around in continuous circles that would never intersect and allow them to see eachother.

with a small starter community, you could just turn them loose in their environment and let them run for a while.  they would genetically optimize their routine to fit their environment.  those that couldn’t find eachother would essentially become extinct.  the rest would adapt to maneuvering in their environment while maintaining communication.

automatic software updates
you could also pretty easily code in a version identifier.  when mating, a robot would check to see if they are from the same version pool as the other.  a previous version would adopt the new version in whole, whereas two robots of the same version would mate normally.  imagine a distributed, loose network of robots that need a software upgrade.  simply release a few robots with the new software and the population would eventually convert automatically to the new version.

your idea here
there are undoubtedly many ways to go about making a reproducing robot, and i’m sure there are many more uses for this technology that i haven’t even though of.  so go make your own sex bots and let us know about it!

this hack is a prime example of how to make something useful out of something useless.

the $1 teleprompter:

• 1 clear cd case cover

• 6 cd cases

• scotch tape

just set this contraption on top of a laptop screen and the clear cd cover reflects the laptop screen in your direction.  your webcam is positioned just behind the cd cover, so your line of sight is aimed directly at the camera.

several of you sent this in, but kris was the first.  thanks!

you know summer is coming when hackers start crawling out from winter hibernation, desiring nothing more than to burn things.  not satisfied with a magnifying glass, this project’s author created a 6′ x 4′ parabolic reflector that uses 112 mirrors to direct the sun’s rays at a single point

don’t take off your tinfoil hats quite yet, but just when you thought rfid tags were all about the man wanting to track you, somebody has come up with a more positive application.

dividuum figured that since some rfid tags can store a kilobyte of data, he should be able to gzip a sid audio file and squeeze it onto one of these larger tags.  he then wrote some software for his pc that interfaces with an rfid reader and will play the sid file contained in a nearby tag.  put a stack of cards next to the reader and it will cycle through them like a playlist.

follow the link if you want to download the source or check out a video of it in action.