Hack a Day » Will O’Brien

Hacking animatronic Elvis

Will O'Brien — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 14:27:00 +0000

[Scott] shot us a tip about some progress on hacking those creepy [Elvis] heads produced by Wowee. The head uses a flash cartridge to store all the data used for the motion/audio control. The cartridge uses NAND flash, so a quick solder job to an XD flash card reader yielded a useful dump of the memory cartridge – which happened to be fat32 formatted. There’s still plenty of work to do, but it seems that it’ll be trivial to replace the data with custom audio and motion commands.

Shell case your flash drive

Will O'Brien — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:13:00 +0000

[Aki] sent in his collection of projects. We like his bullet shell cased USB flash drive and his take on our friend, the simple parallel port based logic analyzer. The flash drive uses a B style USB connector, mounted inside a big freakin’ bullet shell. The logic analyzer is the classic version, but uses a rather nice unix compatible piece of software that supports up to 1mhz sampling rates.

The liquid display

Will O'Brien — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:50:00 +0000

[Nicolas] sent in his liquid display project.Think of it as the opposite of a fountain display. Instead of water, it releases bubbles into a flat panel filled with liquid. There aren’t many details on the site, but it’s a nice twist on an classic concept. He also created an odd sort of liquid interface. Touching the liquid in any of the three chambers in front causes changes in the reaction of the display.

Wiimoteless IR whiteboard

Will O'Brien — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 14:09:00 +0000

[Eduard] sent in his IR webcam whiteboard project. He wanted something like the Wiimote version, but without the expense of a Wiimote. He added some film negative to the camera to reduce the amount of visible light picked up by the CCD. (He notes that you might need to pull the IR filter from your camera to get a decent signal.) The pen is the usual IR LED with a power supply. To do the actual work, he wrote a custom application in Java.

SONAR controlled USB missile launcher

Will O'Brien — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 14:48:00 +0000

Check out this add on for that cheap USB missile launcher we know you bought last year. It uses ultrasonic sensors to provide sonar feedback for the aiming system. A PIC 18F455 drives a servo to aim the sensor and massage the signal from the sensor. It still depends on a PC application to put everything together. If you’d rather play with faster hardware, keep your eyes open for this years defcon bots contest.

Honeybike: bicycle thief honeypot

Will O'Brien — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 14:54:00 +0000

[liseman] decided to build a honeypot for bicycle thieves. He mounted a pay as you go cell phone and a gutted stun gun inside a water bottle. When the phone is dialed, the stun gun is activated thanks to a tap on the vibration motor inside the phone. He also installed some tracking software on the phone so the bike can be traced when stolen.
Location of the stun gun probes depends on certain assumptions: will the thief ride off on the bike, or simply toss it in the back of a truck. (Check your local laws if you’re contemplating doing this yourself.)

UV drip bicycle tracker

Will O'Brien — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 14:00:00 +0000

[Che-Wei Wang] has a few more projects up his sleeve aside from his pneumatic power suit. This is a bit artsy, but he created an ultraviolet ink dropper to leave a trail of invisible ink wherever he rides his bike. Just think of it as a modernized version of [MacGyver]‘s paint can under the bad guys car tracking system.

Behead your laptop

Will O'Brien — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:00:00 +0000

[Mark] sent in this nice trick for breathing new life into an old laptop. [Sarc] had a tibook with a broken LCD. It was still usable with an external monitor, so he simply removed the broken LCD. The tibook (and MacBook) uses a magnetic sensor to monitor the LCD position. To put the machine in the right mode, he taped a magnet in place to make the machine think that the display was in the closed position. To really clean things up, he mounted all the hardware under the desk and used a wireless keyboard and mouse with the machine.

Modding the Oppo 980 for better audio output

Will O'Brien — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:47:00 +0000

There’s an interesting thread discussing mods to improve the inexpensive Oppo 980 DVD player for better performance. The power supply, capacitors and opamps can benefit from some higher end components. [Occam] suggests several replacement opamps options for upgrading the audio output. The realatively low cost of Oppo gear makes it a better risk than modding a multi-thousand dollar DVD player.

1-wire barometer

Will O'Brien — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 14:46:00 +0000

[David] put together this rather nice 1-wire barometer. An MPX4115 measures the pressure while an SMD DS2438 mounted to an 8 pin DIP socket provides the 1-wire interface. The writeup includes a nice description of the board layout and wiring, making this project accessible to just about anyone with a decent tip on their soldering iron.

Fun with Radiohead’s data from ‘House of Cards’

Will O'Brien — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 20:10:00 +0000

Radiohead recently released the 3D data that was used to create the video for their song ‘House of Cards’. You can see the original video and grab the data from here. [Micheal_z] sent in some of the results of his groups playtime with the data. The first effort involved some data translation. Then they created an atomizer of the head and put it up on their ungodly huge 8160×4000 pixel multi-touch display. The video above was created by tracking the background image to orient and overlay the projection.

PIC based boiler controller

Will O'Brien — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:52:00 +0000

We’re used to central A/C, so we were surprised by this PIC controller based heater controller. It’s based around a pump controlled boiler/radiator system. A PIC 16F84 is used to input the set point and control a pump to circulate the heated water as needed. You can grab full schematics on the project page.

Update: We added a screen capture of the schematic after the break since the site keeled over.

The image is wider than our normal column width, so right click and view it to see the entire image.

Simple fish feeder

Will O'Brien — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 14:28:00 +0000

[BahaTanju] sent in this oh so simple fish feeder. It’s a mechanical light timer with a simple dispensing bottle mounted to the rotating time wheel. As the timer rotates, food is dispensed and the aquarium light is activated. If you have bigger fish, you could adapt this to work on a solenoid and use a timer with multiple on/off settings.

USB NES controller plus

Will O'Brien — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 14:46:00 +0000

USB NES controllers are old school these days, but [Jay] put together a nice new take on the project. He shoehorned a USB interface adapter, USB hub and a USB memory stick to store his collection of NES roms and emulators right on the controller. He even dug up a black USB cable to keep the original look of the controller. Now he can just plug in and load his game selection directly from the controller.

The trackable Last HOPE conference badge

Will O'Brien — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 00:48:00 +0000

While Defcon badges have taken on the habit of being hackable electronics, The Last Hope badge is taking a new shape this year. It’s dubbed the Attendee Meta-Data project (AMD for short). Aside from the tombstonian dimensions, it features a trackable RFID tag that’s going to be used to create a different sort of conference experience.

Sure, the creators might use the badges to make sure they meet all the lovely ladies in attendance, but the idea is to use the data to improve the conference experience for everyone. Attendees have the ability to add tags indicating their interests. Combine that data with actual location tracking and people can now network and interact based on what and who they’re looking for. It’s social networking coming full circle to include actual socializing.