Year: 2007

A123 LiIon Battery Pseudo Extra

September 5, 2007 by 18 Comments


Every so often I have to slap myself in the head. I’m surprised that we haven’t covered these things by now. DeWalt’s been selling a LiIon 36 volt battery pack that’s full of the latest A123 cells. These are the same ones that were used in the Killacycle. (I think they’ve got a new batch of cells now).

A while back, [Jeff] sent in a circuit for using multiple packs, leaving the internal BMS in place. [The link is fixed now]

[Robert] sent in a scooter that’s been designed to run these same cells. The custom fabrication and machine work looks fantastic.

SMIP – Footpedal Keyboard Input

September 4, 2007 by 21 Comments


[iank] is tired of reaching for his mouse to use the scroll wheel, so he built SMIP. He modified a musical sustain pedal (momentary on switch) to output an unused key combination. Then he mapped the key combo in X-windows to let him be extra lazy. There are plenty of ways to map keys – usb keypads, etc, but this is the first time I’ve seen anyone try to replace a mouse command with a foot pedal.

Wiimote Firefighting Robot

September 3, 2007 by 17 Comments


Chad brings us yet another use for the Wiimote: firefighting robot. The Wiimote acts as a communications gateway via bluetooth to a host PC. The IR sensor is used to detect the fire, and the commands from the host are passed along via the Wiimote expansion port. The robot is pretty basic, but the use of the Wiimote to relay bluetooth comms via I2C is a fantastic hack.

Add USB Ports And A Flash Drive To You UMPC

September 1, 2007 by 11 Comments


[ThoughtFix] sent in our first ever UMPC hack. It’s along the lines of laptop mods we’ve seen before, but he deserves credit for opening up the already tightly packed inside of his UMPC, tapping the USB interface on his bluetooth card, adding a hub and an internal usb flash drive to provide readyboost to speed up Vista.

NSA@home (DIY Shared FPGA Cracker)

August 31, 2007 by 23 Comments


[Skylark] converted a pair of defective HDTV processing boards into his very own FPGA SHA-1 hash cracker. After two months of evening work, he ended up with 15 Virtex-II Pro FPGAs and 5 Spartan-II FPGAs to do his bidding. (FPGA’s aren’t cheap, so this rocks) Eventually he’s going to give it a web interface to allow cracking submissions on request. Great find on the boards and fantastic work [Skylark].

UClinux Based Embedded Asterix PBX

August 30, 2007 by 12 Comments


In my quest for a new VOIP setup (I’m hunting for a new sip provider – got suggestions?) I ran across an excellent project that’s been put together by [David]. It’s a four port open source asterix PBX that runs under UClinux. He derived the design from a BlackfinOne (A dedicated UClinux board). He covers building the IPO4 in four parts series that starts here. It’s probably one of the more intense open source hardware derived projects I’ve run across.