Router controlling choo-choos over the CAN bus

 

This setup is used to control a model railroad. Well, not entirely this setup. [Gerhard Bertelsmann] already has a proper railroad controller, and it just happens to offer CAN bus communications. He’s using OpenWRT and a cheap router to connect the bus to the network.

Originally he wanted to use a Raspberry Pi board for the project, but … Read the rest

Tuna can and some other trash turned into a Stirling engine

Next time you’re making yourself a tunafish sandwich, try to figure out how to build a Stirling engine from the leftovers (translated). If you can pull it off as well as [Killerlot] did we’d say you’ve earned your hacker badge.

The can used in this project was actually sardines in tomato sauce, but the former contents are … Read the rest

Robot vacuum makes cleaning into a game

This is not a Roomba hack, but a ground-up vacuum cleaner robot build. It’s the result of a class project from six students at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. There’s a slew of information available in their paper, but fair warning that it’s an 8.6 MB PDF file that we couldn’t get Google to translate. We were able … Read the rest

CAN sniffing for steering wheel button presses

You can make those buttons on your steering wheel much more functional if you have a way of monitoring them. Don’t even think of cracking open the factory finish to get to the solder points, just tap into the CAN bus and monitor the data traffic.

The small board seen above is the result of a project [Peter Shabino] … Read the rest

Modern car data systems lack security

Tomorrow a team of researchers will present their paper on Experimental Security Analysis of a Modern Automobile (PDF) at the IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy. Much like the racing simulators we’ve seen they’re exploiting the ODB-II port to get at the vehicle’s Controller-area network, or CAN-bus. We’re not surprised at all that they can display custom text on … Read the rest

Beer can pinhole camera

When [Justin Quinnell] sent in his beer can pinhole camera, we were just floored. The parts are easy to obtain, and the process for building and ‘shooting’ with the camera are near effortless.

The really impressive part of this hack is letting your camera sit for 6 months facing the sun. Yes, you read that correct, a 6 month Read the rest

Now you can record mermaids singing

Buy stock in hot glue, this project corners the market on the stuff. [Leafcutter John] uses the hot goop as his water-proofer of choice when building an underwater microphone (also known as a hydrophone). By installing a couple of piezo elements on one lid of a tin can he is able to record some amazingly clear audio. This is aided … Read the rest