The headphone remote for the third generation iPod shuffle has a special chip that identifies it to the iPod itself. [David Carne] posted an in-depth report about the process he used to reverse engineering that protocol. He’s discovered that the remote uses a peculiar signal to identify it as authentic when the device powers up. We’ve talked about Apple’s use of peripheral authorization before and it seems this is no different. [David] did manage to emulate the authentication using an ATmega88. If you’ve got a shuffle 3G sitting around this info will allow you to operate it with a microcontroller in your next project.

You should all know the drill by now. New electronics hit the market and someone has to post pictures of it spread open bit by bit. The new shuffle is no different as iFixit shows us. There are some very nice pictures of the entire process. As you can see, most of the space is taken up by the battery. The thing that is probably most striking here is the main problem that many people have with it; there aren’t any buttons.

[via Makezine]

With the recent announcement that the only controls for the Ipod shuffle will be on the headphones, many were let down. [James] has come to the rescue, showing that you can just solder new ear buds on the end of the wires. Though this may not be the perfect solution, especially if your cable gets damaged, at least you can get a little better sound. This is a great example of something to show kids. It’s not too difficult and teaches them that if we’re not happy with something, we can hack it.

Breaking from his usually routine of winning at everything, [Glacial Wanderer] has posted one of his projects that didn’t actually work. It’s a Rube Goldberg style card shuffling machine. He wanted something that was visually interesting while still randomizing the cards. A blower would be mounted to the top to mix the cards similar to a lottery ball machine. The cards would then drop into a chute that would make sure all of the cards were oriented correctly before being presented to the user. After building the first prototype, several problems were apparent. The first of which was the fan not being strong enough. His interest was waning and it looked like the time he’d have to invest in fixes was growing quickly, so he decided to cut his loses. He still posted about the prototype in hopes that it could help someone else exploring this sort of machine. A video of the mechanism can be found below.