[Cosimo Orlando] has a Motorola Xoom tablet. It’s an Android device that works great as a tablet, but can double as a Laptop when you need it to by adding a keyboard. The problem he was having is that the USB On-The-Go cables that he tried were never the right size or orientation. So he scavenged them for parts and built his own flat cable for a custom fit.

The final product pictured here actually uses protoboard to give the body some strength. [Cosimo] first laid out the dimensions on the substrate using a felt-tipped pen. He then took connectors from his mis-sized commercial cables and affixed them to the board with a combination of hot glue and solder. From there, just connect the five data lines and ground with some jumper wire and test for continuity. He finished this off with what he calls ‘adhesive plastic glossy black’ shaped to make a decent looking case. If you have any idea what product was used here, let us know by leaving a comment.

[Birdman] has managed to push a custom recovery image to the DroidX. This previously impossible action opens the doors to all kinds of fun hacking. While you can’t just drop a custom Rom on the phone right now, this is the first step in making that happen. You can find the directions in the post, but they’ve got a while to go before they become as easy as something like a jailbreak.

[via phandroid]

[Matthew Arnoff] built an 8-bit computer around the Motorola 6809 processor. He chose this processor because it seems there are a lot of Z80 builds out there and he wanted to try something different.

This actually packs quite a punch. He’s clocking the machine at 2 MHz with 512 KB of SRAM memory. Compact Flash that is FAT formatted provides mass storage. He’s using a serial connection for a user interface. After the break you can see his oscilloscope is used as the monitor. This was easy to accomplish by connecting the serial out to Terminalscope, one of his previous projects.

[Thanks Marc]

Droid has been rooted. It was only a matter of time but we do like to celebrate this sort of thing. Why? Because if you pay for it you should own it. This will probably spark a flame war about licensing agreements and such in the comments but answer this: if it breaks, who pays to fix it? If you’re the one paying for it, you should be able to do what you want with it.

The process seems simple. Copy the magic file onto your SD card and go through the firmware upgrade process. Just make sure you know what you’re doing so that you don’t brick this sexy device.

[via Gizmodo]

Ever wanted to be able to launch a balloon into space, track its location via GPS, take some photographs of the curvature of the earth, and recover the balloon, all for the low low cost of $150? [Oliver Yeh] sent in his teams project, Icarus, which does just that. The group of MIT students found that they could use a weather balloon filled with helium to reach heights of around 20 miles above the earth;  their particular balloon achieved 93,000 feet (17.5 miles). Then, utilizing only off the shelf components with no soldering, conjured up a GPS tracker using a Motorola i290 Prepaid Cellphone. They then used a Canon A470 loaded with the chdk open source firmware to take pictures. After seeing the results of their launch, the team hopes that this could rejuvenate interests in science and the arts.

[Chris Paget] is going to be presenting at ShmooCon 2009 in Washington D.C. this week. He gave a preview of his RFID talk to The Register. The video above demos reading and logging unique IDs of random tags and Passport Cards while cruising around San Francisco. He’s using a Symbol XR400 RFID reader and a Motorola AN400 patch antenna mounted inside of his car. This is industrial gear usually used to track the movement of packages or livestock. It’s a generation newer than what Flexilis used to set their distance reading records in 2005.

The unique ID number on Passport Cards doesn’t divulge the owners private details, but it’s still unique to them. It can be used to track the owner and when combined with other details, like their RFID credit card, a profile of that person can be built. This is why the ACLU opposes Passport Cards in their current form. The US does provide a shielding sleeve for the card… of course it’s mailed to you with the card placed outside of the sleeve.

Technology exists to generate a random ID every time an RFID card is being read. The RFIDIOt tools were recently updated for RANDOM_UID support.

[Thanks Zort]

He had one sitting around that was equipped with a mini USB end. He checked it out and it was the perfect voltage. Some commenters below the project noted that their motorola charger had a higher voltage rating than his. Those would still work, but would require some extra steps to bring the voltage down.

After some careful soldering, and a bit of super glue, he’s left with a perfectly good wall charger. He can charge most things that only use the juice from the wall. Some things refuse to charge though, such as Zunes. There was another project by [Cvesey] that claims to charge Zunes as well. While wall chargers may be available fairly cheaply now, many of us have some of these cellphone chargers just sitting around. Now we have a use for them.