[Kevin Haw] is the proud owner of a brand new Kindle Fire. But to protect the investment he wanted a nice looking case and decided that DIY was the way to go. He ended up repurposing a Moleskine journal as a table cover.

You can do this one yourself in under an hour. Most of the pages in these journals are sewn in place and [Kevin] started by cutting the strings with a hobby knife. Once removed, he used a utility knife to separate the pages that were glued to the cover; this leaves you in the state seen above.

Obviously this unfinished look just won’t do. [Kevin] used some red duct tape duct tape to cover the unsightly spine. This adds strength, and does the job of cleaning up the area, but we might have also applied felt (or microfiber cloth) to the entire inside area for a bit more finished look. The final part is mounting the tablet which was accomplished with adhesive Velcro strips. These can be removed from the back of the Kindle Fire later on if you decided to use a different enclosure.

XDA forum member [craigbru] wanted to beef up the audio setup in his Jeep, and thought that his Nook Color would make a suitable replacement. Since he jailbroke the e-reader, the head unit upgrade lets him do just about anything you can imagine, all from the comfort of the driver’s seat.

Seeing that he would continue to go off-road with the Jeep, he wanted to construct a mounting solution that was convenient and sturdy – something we think he did very well.

The dock was constructed using a Quadratec iVault stereo mount, along with a plastic tablet mount he had on hand. Because convenience was a primary goal, he put together a quick release charging solution as well as a simple audio interface using a set of touch contacts. This allows him to connect and detach the tablet from the Jeep without having to fuss with a bunch of cables each time. He also added an audio equalizer along with a Bluetooth OBDII interface to the setup, allowing him to tweak his tunes and monitor his engine with ease.

We think it’s a great-looking setup, and we’d be lying if we said we didn’t want one as well.

[Thanks, MS3FGX]

As devices get smaller and smaller, it becomes a bigger challenge for engineers to squeeze a product’s components into an ever shrinking footprint. [Bulgarien] certainly found this to be the case with his Asus Eee Pad Transformer. He was not impressed with the volume or clarity of the tablet’s audio, so he disassembled it to see if he could somehow improve its performance.

Once he got the Eee Pad apart, he noticed that the tiny speakers were mounted directly against the back of the tablet’s LCD screen, muffling the audio. He flipped the speaker over to face the back side of the tablet in hopes that it might improve the sound just a bit, but he didn’t think that was a sufficient solution. Using an old speaker as a template, he drilled through the Eee Pad’s case to create his own speaker grilles, lining the inside with a fine cloth to prevent dust from getting inside the case.

He says that the tablet’s audio is far clearer than it was originally, which makes this a pretty compelling modification for anyone that uses their Transformer on a daily basis.

The hackers over at the xda-developers forum always seem to have something awesome brewing, and [fosser2] is no exception. He bought himself a Viewsonic G-tablet, but was a bit disappointed in its lack of a GPS module. He pried the tablet open in hopes of finding a spot where he might be able to cram one in, and was happily surprised at what he found.

It turns out that either Viewsonic had plans to include a GPS module and scrapped them, or they are planning on adding GPS to a future SKU. The tablet’s mainboard already had a spot laid out for the module, as well as the GPS antenna. He carefully soldered in a compatible module from Digikey, and then got to work adding the various other components required to get it working properly.

While the hack doesn’t require that you add a ridiculous amount of parts to the board, you had better make sure your soldering skills are up to snuff before giving it a shot. Those who can’t reliably solder SMD components should probably stay away from this one.

[via Engadget]

[ProtoDojo] wanted to play a racing game on his iPad, but he was not a big fan of using the touch interface for this particular title. Instead, he put together a pretty neat little hack that allows him to play games on his iPad using an old NES controller.

He built a set of custom conductive arms which he mounted on three micro servos. The servos were attached to the iPad screen using small suction cups in the locations where it expects to receive button presses. They are also wired to an Arduino that interprets button presses from the attached NES controller. When the Arduino senses that the D-pad or buttons have been pressed, it triggers the servos, which in turn press the virtual buttons on the screen.

In the video below, you can see that after adjusting the servo positions, the setup seems to work pretty well. You might expect to see some sort of lag with a setup like this, but we didn’t notice any. The [ProtoDojo] web site is currently down due to heavy traffic, but you should be able to find some more build details there, once it becomes functional again.

[Marek Walther] uses a ThinkPad x41 tablet for business on a daily basis. Since he’s on the go with the device he figures that hardware failure is eventually going to strike and with that in mind he purchased a second unit – slightly broken – to fix as a backup. He had never been excited about the speed of the tablet so he set out to find improvements. One of the options was to replace the traditional hard drive with a solid state model (translated). But simply dropping in an SSD isn’t going to make things faster. That’s because the stock drive uses a PATA interface. After a bit of snooping [Marek] discovered that the motherboard has a SATA interface that has a bridge connecting to the PATA plug. By removing the bridge and soldering a SATA cable to the board he was able to improve performance while increasing storage capacity at the same time.

[Deeper-blue] has released all the files necessary to get Android honeycomb working on your nook color. We had a chance to play with the nook color for a bit, but ours was only on Android version 2.1. It seems like they’ve come a long way with the capabilities of this simple e-reader since then.  While he’s built out the majority of the features, it is still lacking some fundamentals, like sound. As you can see in the video after the break, the scrolling is a tiny bit choppy but the applications themselves see to be fairly snappy. We can’t wait to see how this works after a little improvement.

[via engadget]

[Trucki] wanted to upgrade the internal storage on his JooJoo. There’s an mSATA connector inside but devices that use that protocol are hard to come by and when you do they’ll cost you and arm and a leg. He knew he could get solid state drives cheaply that use the mini PCI Express standard, which is mechanically compatible with mSATA. So he set out to alter a mini PCI Express device to work with the mSATA protocol. This entails swapping the transmission lines and rearranging the voltage traces on the connector. To handle the TX- and TX+ lines he desoldered their decoupling capacitors and realigned them to trade their signals. For the 3.3V lines he had to cut the feed and solder jumper wire to the correct pads.

This is some nice work which let him add a 32 GB drive for just sixty Euros. Since the device only comes with a 4 GB SSD an upgrade is almost mandatory if you’re planning to install an alternate OS on the Joojoo.

The Insignia Infocast is a $169 simple media device being sold at Best Buy. Marketed as a way to share photos and run Chumby apps, hackers are starting to release packages to extend its features. [Bunnie] shows us one package in particular that allows it to be used as a web browser with an external keyboard. With an 800Mhz processor, an 800×600 touch screen, and 2 GB of memory, we can see that this is just scratching the surface of what is possible. [Bunnie] points out that some people are working on porting Android to the device, and if you really feel adventurous, you can dig into the hardware.

The JooJoo exists. With all of the recent media coverage of the iPad, we’ve had a chance to hear some interesting discussion and heated debates. Usually the more tech savy and the hackers are most upset about the “closedness” of the hardware and software. We have heard of many alternatives, but usually they’ve been pretty clunky. The JooJoo(originally “crunch pad”) by Fusion Garage gets mentioned, but we’ve been avoiding it since the company had been having so many set backs, we doubted it would actually exist. Well, it does. The shipped the first ones at the same time as the iPad.

What is so special about it? well, heres what you’ll find when you open it up (yeah, with screws).

• a RAM slot, 1 GB provided
• 2x mini pcie slots
• 1x ssd slot
• a 3g sim slot
• Nvidia’s new ion graphics chip
• An atom n270 processor

With 4 Gb of storage, bluetooth, wifi, a camera, external USB ports, a screen boasting 1366×768 resolution, and a slick interface which supports flash, we can’t help but get excited. It costs $499. We think this could be a fantastic hacking platform. We aren’t going to just run out and buy one yet, but if it takes off, we expect to see people hacking these like crazy. Too bad they couldn’t have gotten a little more press to compete with the iPad.

[F00] wrote in to show us his Eeepc that has been modded with almost every upgrade you can cram in one. He has an external cantenna for his wifi, an iPod hard drive, touch screen, added bluetooth with indicator lights, and an internal USB drive for booting linux. While the details are somewhat lacking on his site, you can find an article here for every piece you need to recreate his work. We’ve covered adding the touch screen, mounting external antennas, doing it all without solder, even changing the form factor. Not to mention the other Eeepc we’ve seen that was extremely well endowed.

Reader [Chad Essley] asked us:

“I’m wondering if the vast knowledge base of HackADay’ers out there might know of some way to turn almost any laptop into a touch screen of some kind. Actually, any surface.”

He has an older Wacom Tablet, and would like to be able to add resistive touch screen capabilities so that he isn’t forced to use the Wacom pen. Being an artist and part time hacker, he even summed up the question in a comic-style post.

We know of tools such as the EZscreen instant touch:

Lately we’ve been focusing on multitouch technologies, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t interesting research going on in other areas of human-computer interaction. [Johnny Lee] posted a roundup of some the work that [Gonzalo Ramos] and others have done with pen based input. The video embedded above shows how pressure can be used to increase control precision. Have a look at his post to see how pen gestures can be used for seamless workspace sharing and how pen rolling can give additional control.

[via Unwired View]

[via Gizmodo]