LED wall and Kinect join forces

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[Alex] wrote in to let us know about this Kinect controlled LED wall that was whipped up at the Tetalab hackerspace in Toulouse, France. The wall, which was built earlier in the year, uses some MAX7313 LED intensity controlling shift registers. Each gets its own board and controls the intensity of sixteen different red LEDs. They're embedded in the wall module and covered with ping-pong balls as … [Read more...]

Kilobuck Open Kinect Project Prize

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Full of video and audio sensors, the newly released Kinect is Microsoft's answer to Nintendo's Wii MotionPlus and Sony's PlayStation Move. Now there is money up for grabs to hack it. Adafruit is offering up a one thousand dollar prize to open source the driver for the Kinect. What do they want this driver to do? They want RGB and distance values. We're excited to see the hacks that will come … [Read more...]

Xbox 360 hard drive adapter (redux)

Fun fact, the original title of this article was adaptor.

[Chlazza] let us know about their Xbox hard drive to SATA adapter, allowing the use of an Xbox 360 (original) hard drive on a PC without voiding the drive's warranty. Looking for a fun and enriching experience read: really bored and inspired by a previous adapter we featured, [Chlazza] set out to make their own and ended up succeeding with a board that costs less than $1 in parts. Of course the … [Read more...]

Altoids upstaged by gift card tins

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Nothing Earth-shattering here. Just, dare we say it, really cute! The venerable Altoids mint tin has become an icon of the maker culture. Browsing through past articles on Hack a Day, Adafruit or Instructables, you’ll find project after project for which these pocket-sized enclosures provided just the right fit. Eminently practical, affordable, but the aesthetics have occasionally left … [Read more...]

Our favorite XBOX to HTPC hacks

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Let's face it, the original Xbox is ugly. It might have looked cool when it first came out but now most would be embarrassed to display that old beast with the rest of their entertainment hardware. This is unfortunate because the old girl still has some life in her. If you have tools, time, and talent you can give the box a facelift and bring it back to see the light of day. We've got six of our … [Read more...]

XBMC on Xbox keeps going and going

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It's no secret that XBMC just saw a major release with version 9.11 Camelot. What many don't know is that development for the X in the name (Xbox) stopped two releases ago. That is to say that Team-XBMC no longer officially develops for the platform because of its inability to handle true-HD and many types of compressed content. But, remember that this is an open source project. Just because … [Read more...]

XeXLoader reminds us of Xbox glory days

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The newest version of XeXLoader boasts a pretty slick GUI. This is a homebrew loader for the Xbox 360. Don't get your hopes up, it requires an older kernel and you're not getting on Xbox Live if you do this hack. But think back to when the original Xbox was first hacked. Watching the XeXLoader (after the break) sends us back to the days of EvolutionX. Sure there wasn't much that could be done … [Read more...]