Month: February 2009

Hackit: Hackable Bluetooth Bracelet?

February 17, 2009 by 63 Comments

bluetooth-1

We spotted this odd piece of geek couture on DVICE today. It’s a bracelet that displays incoming calls via Bluetooth and also vibrates. The intended use is kinda interesting, but we wonder what else could be done with it. Could you update it with any text you want by creating fake caller ID messages? You could have your laptop in your backpack and have the bracelet update when it finds an open access point or any other sort of notification. The display shows the word “Connecting” in pictures, but apparently only displays numbers for incoming calls. It also includes a button to reject calls.

Do you have a project that needs a wireless display? Are there other options like this? At $25, this might be worth a try.

Cell Phone Triggered Fireworks

February 17, 2009 by 68 Comments

remote_trigger

[Mr. Hasselhoff] is using a disposable cell phone to trigger his fireworks. He has wired into the speaker leads for the speaker phone. When the phone rings, the current sets off a thyristor allowing for a battery pack to be discharged into a rocket fuse. These fuses heat up and ignite, so you can use them to light fireworks fuses pretty easily. This is pretty simple and cheap, considering the price of the cell phone was only $10. His next idea was to have it recognize dial tones and set individual fuses off, but that would require a microcontroller and a much more complex hack. At that point, you might as well just build a fully fledged wireless fireworks launching system and possibly add rocket launching abilities too.

[thanks Adam]

ShmooCon 2009: Chris Paget’s RFID Cloning Talk

February 16, 2009 by 13 Comments

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-282861825889939203]

When we first saw [Chris Paget]’s cloning video, our reaction was pretty ‘meh’. We’d seen RFID cloning before and the Mifare crack was probably the last time RFID was actually interesting. His ShmooCon presentation, embedded above, caught us completely off-guard. It’s very informative; we highly recommend it.

The hardest part about selling this talk is that it has to use two overloaded words: ‘RFID’ and ‘passport’. The Passport Card, which is part the the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI), is not like the passport book that you’re familiar with. It has the form factor of a driver’s license and can only be used for land and sea travel between the USA, Canada, the Caribbean region, Bermuda, and Mexico. They’ve only started issuing them this year.

Continue reading “ShmooCon 2009: Chris Paget’s RFID Cloning Talk” →

Pirate Bay Trial Starts

February 16, 2009 by 41 Comments

piratebay

The first day of The Pirate Bay’s trial has concluded. The prosecution, representing many large media companies, is attempting to prove that the defendants are directly responsible for copyright infringement. The members of The Pirate Bay are treating the trial as a reality TV farce. From TorrentFreak’s coverage, it sounds like it’s off to a great start: “For several minutes, listeners of the live audio could hear mouse-clicks as Roswall [the prosecutor -Ed.], who earlier claimed to be an expert on computer crimes, tried to get his PowerPoint presentation on the screen.”

[via Waxy]

Solar Batteries

February 16, 2009 by 51 Comments

solarbatt

[Knut Karlsen] put together a prototype set of solar rechargeable batteries. He always seemed to have batteries laying around on his worktable and figured they might as well be charging. The flexible solar cells were given to him by researchers at the IFE and are rated at 1.8V. He used superglue to secure them to the C cells. A silver conductive pen plus flat wires from a Canon lens connect the solar cells to the battery terminals. The batteries just trickle charge for now, but he’s going to try to build cells with built in charge controllers in the future.

Molten Metal LED Display

February 16, 2009 by 19 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMuDudCiPR8]

firstly, we don’t know why they are doing this, and we don’t care. You are watching an LED panel, controlled by molten metal. The panel has the leads sticking down below the bottom of the board, so the metal can make connections as it flows past. They are using Wood’s metal, not mercury so it has to be heated to about 159 degrees Fahrenheit to be fluid. This has been representing problems as the metal tends to stick to whatever container he is holding it in. That actually seems to be what most of the writeup and discussion are about, rather than, what it will be used for.

[Thanks Andre]