“Hacking the Xbox” Released for Free in Honor of [Aaron Swartz]

Hacking the Xbox Cover

[Bunnie], the hardware hacker who first hacked into the original Xbox while at MIT, is releasing his book on the subject for free. The book was originally released in 2003, and delves into both the technical and legal aspects of hacking into the console. The book is being released along with an open letter from [Bunnie]. He discusses the issues he faced with MIT legal and copyright law when … [Read more...]

MIT Media Lab’s month in Shenzhen

mit-media-lab-month-in-shenzhen

When you've got a month worth of blog postings it's pretty difficult to choose one photograph that sums it all up. This one shows the tour group from MIT Media Lab in ESD garb ready for their tour of Okano SMT and Speaker Factory. It was part of a tour of Shenzhen aimed at bringing graduate students up to speed on what it means to manufacture products in the city. Luckily, Freaklabs member … [Read more...]

[Bunnie] builds a laptop for himself, hopefully us

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  [Bunnie Huang], creator of the Chumby and artisan of chips and electrons, is building his own completely open source laptop. It's called the Novena, and is powered by a quad-core ARM CPU, it's got enough bells and whistles to make any hacker happy including an on-board FPGA, dual Ethernet ports, and enough GPIO pins to do some crazy, crazy stuff. [Bunnie]'s laptop is an attempt to … [Read more...]

[Phil Torrone] interviews [Bunnie Huang] about chumby and more

bunnie

Over at Make, [Phil Torrone] has done an interview with [Bunnie Huang]. [Bunnie] has been a major contributor to the pages of Hackaday as far back as we can remember. He started in 2002 hacking X-boxes and sharing his findings with the world. It is this sharing that makes [Bunnie] stand out. He has always shared all his findings and pushed for open source wherever it would fit. We recently … [Read more...]

[Bunnie] mods Chumby to capture epic time-lapse video

chumby-time-lapse

When [Bunny] moved into his apartment in Singapore he was surprised to find that a huge building project was just getting started on the other side of the block. Being the curious sort, he was always interested in what was going on, but just looking in on the project occasionally wasn't enough. Instead, he set up a camera and made a time-lapse video. This isn't hard, you can find a slew of … [Read more...]

[Bunnie's] archives: Unlocking protected microcontrollers

unlocking-protected-microcontrollers

A few years back [Bunnie] took a crack at cracking the security fuses on a PIC microcontroller. Like most of the common 8-bit microcontrollers kicking around these days, the 18F1320 that he's working with has a set of security fuses which prevent read back of the flash memory and EEPROM inside. The only way to reset those security fuses is by erasing the entire chip, which also means the data you … [Read more...]

Composite video output from chumby

c1video_chucknorris (Custom)

[bunnie] posted this pretty slick way of getting composite video out of a Chumby. The Chumby is an open source connectivity device that has already seen some decent hacking. This modification, done by [xobs] isn't too difficult. It only requires patching into some pads on the motherboard and loading a custom kernel to support the external output. … [Read more...]