[Justin N] sent in one of his projects. It’s a digital dashboard gauge for his Subaru. It’s built around an arduino board with a text LCD and standard automotive senders. He’s using it to monitor oil temp, turbo pressure, temperature, acceleration and provide a lap timing. The details are buried in this forum thread, but its worth a look if you’ve spent time geeking out on your car.
Year: 2007
GSM Alarm
Fresh from the tips line, [Pedro] sent in his GSM alarm. He combined a GSM phone, a motion sensor and BasicX24 controller board. If the detector trips during a set time period, the alarm sends SMS messages to the terminator, er whoever you want. He was kind enough to release the code, but I’d like to see this with a smaller micro-controller board to keep the cost/size down.
ATLAS Powered Rope Ascender Gen 3
This last weekend we got a chance to check out ATLAS Devices‘ latest version of their powered rope ascender. You probably saw their first generation device in the news earlier in the year. It was originally built for a design competition, but they’re now on generation 3. The earliest version used a capstan style winder, but newer versions have a far more simple/elegant design. The original had a ton of thrust and needle bearings that were hard to keep in adjustment. The new design is lighter, less abrasive to the rope, and easier to use.
Free Your IPhone
I wasn’t going to post this – it’s a freakin phone after all. But I’ve gotten quite a few tips on it, and I’d like them to end. [George] made a concerted effort to hack the iPhone – and it paid off. After his crazy ebay auction that topped out at 99,999,999.99 last time I checked, he ended up trading his first phone for a Nissan 350z and a few more iPhones.
He documented his process, step by step – if you’ve got the skills, you can probably do it yourself. The soldering work is damn fine work – probably the hardest thing there is. The write up is a little hard to follow, so plan on taking some time to comprehend everything. (Blogging software isn’t the best way to organize how-tos, trust me on this.) My hats off to [George], he did some great work. – So, why didn’t I want to post it? All this work yielded one thing: carrier choice for the iPhone.
New XBox 360 Downgrade Hack
[Paul] let me know about a new way to get a hacked kernel on a XBox 360. A new timing attack will soon allow you to install an older kernel with without having the CPU key which was the catch 22 situation before. The proof of concept ressurected a bricked XBox by doing some interesting things to one of the NAND (memory) blocks on the machine.
Great news for the homebrew/hacking scene!
Punch Your Alarm Clock
This is probably the most entertaining “application note” I’ve ever seen. These things are usually a bit dry, ok, they make your eyes turn to a previously unknown state of matter. This one involves making your alarm clock snooze when you beat it. The trick? Wire an accelerometer to the snooze button. It takes a bit of supporting circuitry, but looks do-able for anyone worth of their soldering iron. Thanks to [Andy] for sending it in.
Hey, we have a tips line. Send in your hacks!
Pandora’s Battery (unbrick Your PSP)
[krazywhiteguy310] let me know about the announcement of the Pandora battery hack. It’ll cost you a Sony PSP battery to pull off the hack, but once you’re done, you can use it to jump start your bricked PSP to load up a memory imaged designed to unbrick the PSP. (I haven’t tested it, so I’m taking this on faith) Excellent news if you’ve bricked your PSP.
