Nokia team PUSH is proud to announce they have winners from the contest they held over the past two months. You may remember when we first told you about the competition, but here’s a recap. All you had to do was think of a good hack for the Nokia N900! Winners will receive funding and other resources to make their hack come alive. What possible hacks made the cut?
Haptastic – A compass and map? Not any more with this wearable guide that can lead the way.
KAPingwiththeN900 – Flying high with this aerial photography project
LIGHT HACK CREW – Bring light graffiti to the N900
Rocket Pocket – Just Bonkers! An N900 in orbit, we love it!
SolderinSkaters – Tony Hawk who? It’s all about Solderin Skaters!
[Evow04] has been working hard to run Android on a Meizu M8 smartphone and we’re beginning to enjoy the fruits of his labor. The Meizu M8 is a Chinese cell phone very similar in appearance and hardware to the iPhone. The factory firmware runs Windows CE 6 but there is no official support for Android. It looks like [Evow04's] upgrade method is fairly easy; copy an IMG and BIN file to the root of the phone, backup the Windows CE portion, and then use the upgrade mode to flash the two files.
We’re pretty impressed with Android, especially the potential that it represents. Having another device that runs the OS is a good thing but at $350-$400 this isn’t any cheaper than just buying an Android phone.
Oh, for crying out loud! While we were all giddy reporting on yesterday’s wonderfully done head-mounted computer, [Andrew Lim] of recombu.com comes along and essentially does the same thing with an HTC Magic handset and three dollars worth of Harbor Freight crap. Linux kernel, WiFi, accelerometer, the whole nine yards. Consider our collective ass handed to us.
Funny thing is, either of these could be considered The Consummate Hack. One flaunting the creator’s know-how with its custom-designed parts and delicate engineering, the other exhibiting a more punk flair with random scraps and off-the-shelf technology achieving much the same effect — a solution so obvious we were blind to it. Whatever your outlook, this is a great day to be a hacker!
[Eric] just told us about the watch he developed that displays info from a BlackBerry via Bluetooth. The watch displays updates, message alerts, incoming call information, and… tells time. Setup and control is handled with the BlackBerry keypad. The device is charged with a micro-USB connection and will last for about four days without a recharge. We’d chalk up the rather long battery life to the use of an OLED display, which will use less energy when a portion of the display is left black.
So why is it here? Well, he’s got a couple of blog posts that detail two of the final prototypes that you might find interesting. What else? Oh yeah, his original prototype used an Arduino with a Nokia 3310 LCD display. For those of you who continually call the Arduino a worthless toy, looks like it’s good enough to use when taking a product to market.
We’ve got a few old cell phones sitting around and apart from salvaging the LCD screen we’re not quite sure what to do with them. [Gingerpete50] turned his into a desktop Decepticon figurine. This masterpiece is a delightful conversation piece and when he’s tired of it decorating his cubicle, we’re sure there will be plenty of people he can hand it down to. The figure doesn’t transform back into a cell phone and it uses a few extra parts he had on hand, but neither of these things bother us. What it does have is some articulated joints and a few LEDs that you can see above. We haven’t tried our hand at custom model building, but after seeing this you can be assured it’s on our list.
When we first saw Vodaphone’s ringtone commercial where 1000 cell phones perform a section of the William Tell overture, we just assumed it was some slick video editing, not to be taken seriously. Apparently, we were wrong. They actually did this. They actually sent text messages to all the phones in correct timing to play the music. In the video after the break, you can see some details on how they pulled it off. They had to perform this during non peak usage hours to ensure that all their texts went through. We think this project is pretty impressive. Actually, we still don’t know how they pulled it off, we can’t seem to predict how long a text message will take to reach its destination with any kind of reproducible accuracy.
[Timo] tipped us off about a War Monument that has been… upgraded. The story starts when a monument was erected in Cherkassy, Ukraine to commemorate the ultimate sacrifice that was made by Russian soldiers during World War II. The huge statue and expansive plaza were capped off by an eternal flame. Unfortunately, when the Soviet Block broke up, the natural gas that had been provided by the government became a luxury so the flame was extinguished.
The eternal flame sat unlit, a sad commentary to the remembrance of the dead. But how to fix this issue? As cell phone companies came into the area, a need for cell phone towers arose. At some point a solution was reached; a cell phone tower was built in the bowl of the eternal flame and then wrapped with an LED marquee. The marquee now displays the image of a flame in perpetuity.
We’re not quite sure what to think about this. After some adjustment, the substitution of LEDs for flames will probably become accepted. The monument is now providing a useful purpose for the living, and once again shows a flame. We think that having something there showing that the memory is still alive is much better than the message an unkempt derelict sends.
[Vlad-Andre] used some of his free time to build an alti-variometer. He does some para-gliding near restricted air space and wanted a backup altitude warning that would help keep him below the mandated altitude. His solution uses the SparkFun Weather Board in conjunction with their BlueSMiRF dongle to measure altitude and transmit it via Bluetooth. From there, he wrote a program to grab the transmitted data with his cell phone and display the information. His application also has the ability to set altitude warnings and log changes over time.
Using this system he is able to get altitude data with 3.5 inch accuracy. Because the capture application is written in Java it should be easy enough to make this work on other cell phone models. The project is clean and works well but we estimate the cost of the parts to be between $250-300, making it out of reach for those who don’t have a specific need for these types of measurements. This is especially true for paragliders who have much less expensive options available to them.
[Thanks Carl-Emil]
No matter how grumpy you are in the morning, this video should make you smile. This is one of the jobs many of us dream of. Take a tour around Nokia’s product testing facility with Engadget. Watch in the video as phones are squashed, pinched, smacked, baked, shaken, dialed, slid, opened, and closed repeatedly. Sure, we don’t get to see any of them obliterated, but it sure is fun to see those machines at work. Each one of these tests will be run until the phones eventually come apart or cease to function. Too bad they didn’t show us that part of it.
[Aaron] tipped us off about a project over at mobilehackerz. They built something of a PVR for 1seg broadcast stations (Google translation). The 1seg broadcast standard is aimed at mobile video service and available in countries like Japan and Brazil. Their terrestrial TV signals (ISDB-T) are divided into 13 segments per channel but the HD broadcasts only use 12 of those segments. This allows the 1seg data to be broadcast in the 13th segment.
mobilehackerz wanted to record each station’s complete daily broadcast. So they picked up a bunch of USB tuner fobs and chained them together with two powered USB hubs. The video is delivered in a type of MPEG2 format so once pulled out of the air the stream can be dumped directly onto disk. It seems they’ve got some code available for this system but even with the translated page we can’t really figure out what it does. If you’re Japanese skills are strong, fill us in with a comment.
At 3000 yen (about $34) per tuner this is not the most economical PVR capture system we’ve seen. Add to that the 15 fps broadcast and we’re not sure this is of all that much use. But then again, if you have to ask “what is it for?” you’re missing the essence of the hack.
