Month: July 2007

Getting Ready For Defcon 15

July 31, 2007 by 11 Comments


Just stoking up a bit for Defcon 15 later this week. [Eliot] and I’ll both be there.
My personal coffee stash is down to a single selection of Ethiopian Yirg, so I probably won’t enter the coffee wars. (But I might stop by and add some Hack-A-Day swag to the pot for the winner.)

The final speaker schedule looks really good. It’ll be difficult to decide which talks to visit. The DefconBots event should be interesting. I’m hoping to see some original hardware creations.

Looks like wireless cracking is still one of the most popular topics. Hack-A-Day friend [Aaron] of Midnight Research will be presenting the latest on wicrawl.

Oh, and just prior to Defcon, the Pwnie Awards will take place at Black Hat.

See you in Vegas!

SIP For The SMC WSKP100

July 31, 2007 by 2 Comments


[sprite_tm] made my morning by sending in his latest work. After opening up his new SMC WSKP100 (Skype wifi phone) to identify the hardware differences, he managed to shrink a flash image from the SMCWSP100 to fit on his new toy. Then he spent some time hacking the kernel from the former to work on his phone. The result? A SIP operational phone that’ll connect to his asterix server at half the price of SMC’s official SIP phone.

Wiimote Car Accelerometer

July 28, 2007 by 19 Comments


This one’s pretty simple, but anyone who’s ever spent time tweaking an engine will appreciate it. [Kevin]’s been using a wiimote to measure the acceleration of his car. He put together a script to dump the accelerometer output to a CSV file, then graphed it with Excel. He notes that the accelerometer output isn’t that precise, but it’s good enough to give you feedback on your mods.

Switchmode Power Supply Hacking (power Your Laser)

July 27, 2007 by 7 Comments


[Mike] wanted a better power supply for his argon laser, so he modded some switchmode power supplies. With a few tweaks, he had a few adjustable voltage outputs and a nice solid supply of electrons for his laser projects. If you need a lab quality adjustable power supply for your projects, this is a nice way to get it on the cheap. (He’s in the UK, but the same ideas should apply to us models.

Mecha Turbo Crazy Coffee Roaster

July 26, 2007 by 20 Comments


I’m a wee bit of a coffee geek. This roaster was built by [farmroast]. It’s a highly modified of version of the roaster that I’ve been using for the last year or so. A convection oven up top provides the primary heat source, while the beans are spun around in the roast chamber below. A pair of thermocouples let you know what’s going on inside the chamber. When the roast is done, pop the top, dump the beans into the drawer, and a fan mounted below cools them to room temperature in about a minute. It was put up for a home roaster building contest – You might be interested in the other entries.

I hope the coffee wars at defcon are this interesting.