[Seth King] wasn’t satisfied with current robotics platforms that don’t work well outdoors. He started the Open Rover Kickstarter with the end goal of having a 6-wheel robot with a rocker-bogie suspension just like the Mars landers. We’re sure it’ll be an interesting platform.

Adding a Flash to a key fob video camera

[doctormord] picked up a key fob “spycam” and was surprised that there wasn’t any onboard illumination. Then again, that would probably defeat the purpose of the “spycam.” A transistor, LED and resistor later (translation), he had a camera with a light. Pics here.

Automated WEP cracking

This is a video of [Elliott] using his autocrack script to crack a WEP wi-fi network. It took [Elliott] less than a minute to crack a network he set up. Lesson: don’t use WEP.

Adding wi-fi to a laptop the fast way

This laptop used to have a broken Mini-PCIe wi-fi adapter. [Mikko] fixed the wireless by taking out the old card and hooking up a USB wi-fi adapter. He soldered the USB leads directly to the back of an internal USB port and used hot glue “to prevent bad things from happening.” A very easy, fast, and cheap way of fixing a broken wireless adapter.

Han Solo’s soldering iron

When [Craig] was 15, he broke the Bakelite casing of his father’s soldering iron. Being a good son, he fixed it by gutting his original Star Wars Han Solo blaster. Nice, but not as great as Starsong from My Little Pony.

At the Revision 2011 demo compo, a museum project called [MEGA] won first place in the “Wild” category with their zero bit recreation of “tennis for 2”. Entirely made of analog electronics, the retro game completes its presentation on a round o-scope screen. You can see a video of it after the break.

Mint-tin bicycle computer

[Alexdlp's] newest instructable is a attractive and compact bicycle computer running off of an Arduino, and sports the usual bike features. It does not stop there, adding in a 16×2 LCD gives more room for data in both numeric form and bar graph form, and adding in a pair of radio modems allows that data to be fed back home where it can be logged and compared, perfect for the more serious biker.

8085 Reference Card

If you enjoy retro computers, or would like to make your own, you will find this Intel 8085 reference card is a real treat. Based on a original reference card, it has been expanded to give more detail for additional interrupts, electrical reference, T-State timing, and undocumented instructions.

Connect a SNES controller to your Android phone

[Bruno] wanted to be able to use a real SNES controller with the emulator on his HTC Android phone, packing in an Arduino, 6 AA batteries, and a breadboard and mission accomplished! Hardly as portable as the phone, but we commend the “get it done” sprit. Join us after the break for a quick video.

Remaking the first video game

Connect a SNES controller to your Android phone

In response to last week’s post about parts scrounging with a heat gun, Hackaday forum member [BiOzZ] decided to try doing the same thing in his oven. It seems to work quite well, but we’re wondering if there should be any concerns over the lead content of the solder. Anyone care to chime in?

Spill-proof parts holder

Have you ever been in the midst of disassembling something and knocked over your container full of screws onto the floor? [Infrared] has a simple solution to the problem which also happens to keep a couple of plastic bottles out of the landfill.

Easy button stops abuse of the word awesome

Do you often repeat a word ad nauseam? Make author Matt Richardson does, and he hacked a Staples “Easy” button to help him break his addiction to the word “Awesome”.

Cheap Remote-controlled baseboard lighting

[Sean] scored a pair of LED deck lighting kits for a steal and decided to install them into his newly renovated kitchen. They are currently remote operated, but he plans on adding an X10 interface as well as PIR sensors for automatic triggering in the near future.

Yet another LCD recapping guide

It starts with a finicky backlight, or perhaps a high-pitched whine from the back of your display – by now, we’re sure that everyone knows the symptoms of an LCD panel that’s just about to die. [Eric's] Syncmaster recently quit on him, so he pried it open and got busy recapping. It’s running again, and he wanted to share his repair process in case others out there own the same display.

There are two power plants presented in 360 degree panoramas here. All those dials and switches just get us giddy. The one pictured above was built in 1918 and is still in operation. Not only are the control rooms here, but several other locations around the facility too.

Energy recycling prosthetic foot:

At first, we thought that this energy recycling prosthetic foot was going to be a power generating device to harvest some energy using our weight in the heel compression. Actually, it is showing off a fancy micro controller based system for reproducing our naturally springy step.

Translating in real time with google:

Google is working on a system to do real time translation of text on your phone. It is integrated into the “google goggles” software which allows you to search the internet using images from your phone. This is pretty cool, but with google translate and OCR being readily available for quite some time now, we have to wonder; why didn’t we think of that?

Exploded images of everyday objects:

[Adam Voorhes] has put together a small collection of exploded views of everyday objects. While they aren’t laid out great for reference, they look good and might make nice artwork in your workshop.

Marble Junker

Here’s a quick and dirty kinetic sculpture. It’s a track for a steel marble to roll around in with a magnet on a rotating wheel to pick it up and start it over again. Not every hack has to be a beautiful masterpiece, they just need to be fun. Of course, if this were an incredibly complicated piece it probably wouldn’t have ended up in a links post.

Eight-eyed Computer

[AlexP] has been involved in the NUI Group and in writing drivers for the PS3 Eye. This time around he’s got eight of them running on one computer at 60fps. Security cameras come to mind but this could be useful in a lot of projects. We’d be interested in seeing what you come up with. [Thanks Kyle]

Urine-gone

If you have a problem with folks peeing on your stoop then this is the answer. [Hannes Nehls] put together a urinating-drunkard deterrent by placing a humidity sensor in the (achem…) trouble-spot and a small tube above. When they pee on the sensor, it pees right back on them. Video available if you click through to the link.

Amplifier Tutorial

If you’re a little shaky when it comes to understanding and working with amplifiers this tutorial is for you. It’ll walk you through the basic concepts, then apply that knowledge in a simple op-amplifier circuit.

Severed Heads

It’s always nice to end a links post with something creepy. These faces are made from a cast of the artist’s face. They sing a trio of nonsense and it’s the life-like movements combined with the obviously mechanical backend that tingles our spine. But they’re really just a novelty and not the real thing. [Thanks Browneyedalbino][via Powered by Nerd]

Everyone Remembers Free day right? [The Ideanator's] Bus Pirate came in such a nice red box – he decided to make it his permanent case.

[Chico] is in the middle of making a CNC, but decided to make some music with the steppers in the mean time.

What looks like an old wooden box is actually [Ludvig's] super sweet retro arcade cabinet. Complete with a giant emergency stop red button.

Who says Legos are dead? [Carl] used them to create a simple and cheap diffraction grating projector. Including video!

[Torchris] used an Ethernet shield exactly as it was designed, sending data over Ethernet. Still a nice hack for those needing help working with Ethernet shields and Arduino.

Finally [Robert] let us know about a friends Arduino Binary Clock. But we think his elegant use of tape and a sand blaster to engrave glass is cooler.

Ah the beauty of watching molten solder pull SMD components into place. Yeah, we’ve seen it before, but for some reason it never gets old.

The glory days of wardriving are certainly behind us but if you’re still hunting in certain areas for access points you can leave the laptop at home. A homebrew program called Road Dog can turn your PSP into a WiFi search device. You must be able to run custom code to use this app.

Ferrofluid is our friend. But having grown up watching the Terminator and Hellraiser movies we can’t help being a little creeped out by the effects seen in this movie.

Follow along with the NASA astronauts in this 20 minute HD tour of the international space station. It’s a cramped place to live but we can’t help thinking that it looks incredibly clean. After all, where would the dirt come from?

How are your woodworking skills?  Can you take a wooden block and turn it on a lathe until you have a lampshade 1/32″ thick? We’d love to see how these are made, but imagine the artist’s reaction when hours of labor are ruined by a minuscule amount of misplaced pressure on a carving tool. Patience, we’ll learn it some day!

This video from the past that is about the future of  travel does leave us wondering why our cars don’t have built-in radar for poor visibility? We’ve already realized the rear-view-mirror-tv-picture, but we’re going to need your help before the flying police/fire/ambulance-mobile is a common sight. Oh, the fun of seeing a high-tech push-button selector 3:30 into the video. Perhaps the touch-screen was a bit beyond the vision of the time.

Sometimes you have so many servants you need to find creative things for them to do. Only the most discriminating of the super-rich employ a person whose sole responsibility is to erase and redraw the hands of a clock each minute. This video is obviously a result of the global recession as the live time-keeper has been let go; a looping recording took his job!

Last time we checked in with [Marco Tempest] he was syncing video over multiple iPhones. Now he’s at it again with an augmented reality setup. A camera picks up some IR LEDs in a canvas and translates that into information for a video projector. We’d call this a trick, but it’s certainly not magic.

Hacklab’s laser cutter got the customary musical treatment. You can see it play the theme from mario brothers here. It’s nothing new to us, but we still enjoy seeing it done.

Ever been curious how a pole transformer is made? Quench that curiosity with this educational video. [via HackedGadets]

Here’s a quasi humanoid robot that is designed to be your workout trainer. He’ll show you the exercises, give you motivational and encouraging pep talks and even play games with you. We think the idea sounds good, but in execution, he flails his arms and randomly says creepy insincere sounding things like “I’m having  fun. I could play this game all day long. I’m having too much fun.” That’s just creepy.

[Mr. Nelson] got sick of walking all the way down the hall just to see if there was anyone in the bathroom. His solution was to build this massively overdone indicator light system. It uses a proximity sensor located in each bathroom to determine occupied status and has a fantastic industrial look.

If you’ve ever wanted to get into 3d photography you’ll be pleased to see this writeup on how to build a simple rig and compile the images for different viewing methods.

We were amazed by these beautifully crafted brass machines. The one in this video is solar powered and seems to run pretty smoothly. Not bad for something that was all hand crafted from sheets of brass.

Be careful with this one folks. This video shows how to melt a beer bottle in your microwave. We’re not sure why you would want to, but we sure enjoyed watching it happen. Maybe that’s reason enough.

While browsing the web for new and interesting hacks to show you guys, we run across all kinds of interesting stuff. Often, we would love to share them with you, and get your thoughts, but they just simply don’t have enough information or aren’t hacks at all. This is where HackaDay Links come in. Occasionally we’ll gather up some interesting stuff and post it all at once. These probably won’t be hacks, so if you’re not into seeing other interesting stuff, just wait for the next post.

We used to do these posts from time to time, and we’ve decided to start again. Without further adieu, here are the links:

1.Medgadget has a pretty cool crutch system which uses your upper leg for support instead of your arm. Seems like a better way of building support for digitigrade legs to us.

2.VR pods sure are looking funny now days. Seems like you could do this on your own pretty easy with some simple dome projection.

3.We were unaware of The Gadget Show, till we saw this post on DVICE. For those that don’t want to sit through it all, they do two projects. One is a wearable computer jacket with a projector built into the sleeve, the other is a set of iPod controls built into some horribly gaudy high heels. We shouldn’t judge the fashion though, they probably know fashion better than us.

4.These massive robotic arms have been all over the net for the past few weeks. The video is sort of neat, with cool cgi effects, but all he does is wave them around somewhat lethargically. We do hope to see something more soon.

5.Princess Leia, sunbathing. We had to share. Thank us later.

6.You could win [Ben Heck]‘s PS3 laptop. Unfortunately you have to spend a bunch of money at the score. Just in case you’re curious, they value it at $7500

• MediaDefender takes down Revision3. Revision3 posts about it; takes down self.
• Monkey cyborg
• Multiplayer iPod Touch Pong [via Waxy]
• Powered exosuit available for preorder, 200 pound capacity
• Atari Punk Capsule [via BoingBoing]
• That CSS history leak keeps getting pitched as a feature [via Download Squad]
• Turbografx-16 emulator for iPhone
• Video of cyborg Luke arm from All Things D shows a 3 armed engineer; we’d like one too.
• Comcast gets defaced by meddling kids.
• BBtv goes to a wearable technology fashion show.
• ASUS Eee Box teardown [via Engadget]

See an interesting project? Please send us your tips!

• First Wii Fit hack: Control Google Earth
• New Android UI demoed
• Google opens App Engine
• Windows 7 demoed, multitouch ducttaped in
• Mac security update released
• Hacker scripts $50000 in microdeposits
• Displacements shows history of white washed room
• Biggest drawing in world was a hoax