[Corrosion] sent in a tip about the Weaponised Auditing Response System he built inside a suitcase that, “has all the tools (and then some) for a wireless assault”.

The WARS is equipped with two WiFi adapters and two bluetooth adapters for all the wardriving and bluejacking anyone could ever want. [Corrosion] also included a 4 channel, 2.4GHz video scanner for warviewing. Everything runs off of a 12 inch netbook that will eventually run linux, and we’re really liking the 1970s suitcase aesthetic the WARS has – it looks like [Corrosion] is about to step into the set of a Beastie Boys video.

We were wondering about including a long range RFID sniffing antenna (PDF warning) behind the monitor of the suitcase’s monitor and asked [Corrosion] about it. He said it sounded doable, but is out of funds at the moment, so if you know how to build a cheap RFID antenna with a 50 foot range, drop [Corrosion] a line.

There’s a video demo with some stills of the build included after the break.

Being hackers, sometimes we just want to hack something together, not engineer it. This projector is a great example. Made mostly out of cardboard and duct tape (or duck tape if you prefer). He picked up a 12v LED array, a cheap fresnel lens, an LCD from a “back up monitor” and a focusing lens taken from a magnifying glass. Sure, we’ve seen better, much better. But seeing an evenings worth of feverish wire twisting and taping is always pleasant. It may look pretty dim in the video, it may be as well, but keep in mind that it is common for them to appear much brighter in person or if shot with a night setting on a digital camera.

[Newtonn2] dropped a tip in our inbox this morning that made us quite happy. This is a step by step build of a small form factor LED based projector. While the size may not get some of you too excited at first, those of us who have built projectors before know that home made ones are usually quite large. This one is roughly the size of the small office projectors you would see in a large retailer.  He’s using a 30 watt LEd for the light and we didn’t notice a lumen measurement anywhere, but it looks bright enough to be watchable. Pictures usually turn out dark, so in person, the projection probably looks more bright and crisp. Now he just needs to find a high definition LCD that size.

[j] sent in this nice writeup on how to revive a dead projector. he managed to pick one up for $20 that had a broken bulb. While the prices of bulbs have come down considerably, they can still be a couple hundred dollars. Being resourceful, he decide to just use a halogen bulb that he picked up at his local big box shop. In the photos, he’s using a 50w mr16 bulb. The results really aren’t too bad. Especially considering that his cost for the entire project is now roughly $25. He does, however suggest that a 100 watt bulb wouldn’t be a bad investment.  His projector seems to need some cleaning and adjustment in the lenses as well, but for $25 it isn’t too shabby. We’ve had this submission for a bit, but it didn’t have any pictures of the projector actually working. During our conversation, we may have possibly suggested a picture we’d like to see. You can find it after the break.

We did cover a very similar one last year, which had the driver integrated into a custom bracket, but the project page seems to be gone. There is also the possibility that the projector you get doesn’t just have a bulb problem. Sometimes it is the polarizer that needs replaced.

Egotistic? Never.

[Patrick] directed us to his project for alternate realism. The final goal is to be able to walk around in a space wearing a head mounted display, exploring a virtual representation of that space. This virtual representation could be altered, stylized, augmented and modified in countless ways. It is an exploration in perception, similar to enjoying different styles of painting, we could enjoy different styles of viewing a real space. Currently, it isn’t quite real time. He has to scan a room with a somewhat bulky device, then plug into his display to explore it. Being able to scan quickly and reliably enough shouldn’t be far off. [Patrick] notes that others have done almost real time scans at home already.

[Pyrofer] sent in his stereoscopic game project and we are just giddy with excitement. He has hacked apart an old TomyTronic 3D handheld viewer and put new guts in. He’s using a PIC micro to push stereoscopic imagery to twin LCDs. He wrote all code from scratch including the 3d library, wii nunchuck driver, and LCD driver. This thing even has bluetooth so he can play multiplayer if he ever makes a second one. The whole unit is kept alive via a lithium polymer battery so you don’t have to worry about any cords other than the wii nunchuck.  This thing is awesome, we would love to play with one. You can see a video after the break.

[banzai] wasn’t happy with the performance he was getting out of his Samsung netbook. He decided it was time to do something about it. He noticed that Dell and HP both sell an optional HD decoder card for their netbooks. After a short search, he found one on ebay for only $24. He had to give up his internal wireless, but he doesn’t mind using a USB wireless dongle. Sure this isn’t horribly complicated, but he has information here that might help smooth out the process.

[via OlivierDole]

Western Digital recently released a media player that attaches to your TV and allows you to play HD media straight from an external USB drive to the television. With a price point of about $100, it’s strange that the device hasn’t made more of a stir in the consumer electronics market. Of course, if it exists, someone will hack it, though. Clever hardware and software hackers have already managed to get an alternative firmware running on the device, allowing for packages like a web server, RSS reader, Apple trailer viewer, and other linux-based packages. It’s good to see a device with so many software mods so early into production.

Related: OpenPogo, an alternative to Pogoplug software

[Dennis] tipped us off to his Tome project. It looks like two projects using very similar hardware. The first is the Tome GS; a tiny game system that looks like it could hang from a keychain. This is apparently the second revision of this system, based off of some of his comments. He’s done a pretty good job, it looks solid and functional. It even includes a zigbee wireless module for communication with others. He states that the graphics should be roughly the same as a gameboy advance.  The second is the Tome MP, a portable media player roughly the same size as a first gen iPod nano. It is equipped with bluetooth, though he’ll be removing that in the next iteration in favor of a zigbee. We would really love to see more information on the design behind these projects.

[Bacteria] tipped us off to his latest portable system mod called IntoGrafix. The TurboGrafix-16 was awesome when it was released. the graphics were, compared to Nintendo, astonishing. Its games were these little cards, like a thick credit card. [Bacteria] wanted to revive his old one in a more portable fashion.  He designed a custom case to fit the whole thing into, which is pretty impressive itself. The screen is the trusty old PSone screen.  The last time we saw a TurboGrafix, it was in a mini Arcade cabinet.

[HyPe] over at the Natural User Interface Group developed this concept as part of his Master’s Degree in Industrial Design. This suitcase sized projector and computer allows people to have a 60″ multitouch screen available wherever there is a large enough surface.  The current software is designed for ad-hoc meetings about large-scale construction plans. The rolling case includes a short-throw projector and webcam. Just set it on top of your work surface, lift the lid, and it’s ready to go.

Ars Technica writes about three new toys coming out this year: a sub 100$ projector, tv game, and night vision goggles. The projector runs at standard TV resolution, takes standard composite in, and outputs an okay picture. The night vision goggles are monocular but focus both eyes on a single RGB LCD. The goggles uses an array of IR LEDs instead of amplifying ambient light to see in the dark. Lastly, they have a standalone implementation of the arcade game Big Game Hunters. The rifle uses a sensor bar to do the motion tracking and features a 32MB rom to hold the game files.

[Ben Heck] has just completed one of his more unique laptop game consoles. This time around it’s a Commodore 64, which he’s been attempting since 2006. Recently he scrapped everything and started fresh on what turned out to be the fastest build yet. While it certainly looks similar to his other laptops, he put in a lot of effort to give it the appearance of an 80′s computer from the beige color to the texture. He used an original C64C motherboard since it was the final and smallest revision and coupled that with an original keyboard. A 1541-III-DTV allows use of an SD card as a floppy device. Just drag any disk image onto the card and it’s ready to go. Check out a video of it in use below.

Bug Labs, the company that makes modular electronics that allow you to build your own tech doohickeys quickly and easily, has announced five new modules: BUGprojector, a mini DLP projector developed in conjunction with Texas Instruments, which sounds very much like the tiny DLP projector we posted about last week; BUGsound, an audio processing module with four stereo input/output jacks, a microphone, a speaker, and builtin hardware codecs; BUGbee (802.15.4) and BUGwifi (802.11 and Bluetooth 2.0+EDR), which will let you connect wirelessly with your PAN and WLAN, respectively; and BUG3g GSM, for connecting to (you guessed it) 3G GSM networks. In conjunction with Bug Labs’ existing series of modules, especially the highly versatile BUGvonHippel universal module, you’ll be able to create some pretty kickass gadgets. No word yet on pricing, although Bug Labs expects to ship by the end of Q1 2009.

The team from Tech-On has taken the time to teardown two interesting microprojectors. The first model they tackled was the Optoma PK101. It’s based around a digital micromirror device (DMD) like those used in DLP. Separate high intensity red, green, and blue LEDs provide the light source. A fly-eye style lens reduces variations between images. They noted that both the LEDs and processors were tied directly to the chassis to dissipate heat.

The next projector was the 3M Co MPro110. It uses Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCoS) technology. The light source is a single bright white LED. The projector seems to have more provisions for getting rid of heat than the previous one. The most interesting part was the resin polarizing beam splitter. It not only reflected specific polarizations, but also adjust the aspect ratio.

[via Make]