[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PllYYGakjEU]
The creator of the pac man modded roomba is at it again. This time, [Ron Tajima] is going in a completely different direction. He has made a baby cradle attachment for his roomba. We don’t know what safety concerns there might be, but the baby seems OK with, so far. We’ve seen robot baby cribs before, but they cost much much more and don’t clean your house.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHrWllxRLgQ]
[derektroywest] has posted a detailed step by step breakdown of making a Daft Punk costume. They’ve done a great job, the overall look is very convincing. They include links to where to get each part as well as information on how they pulled it off. The helmets were inspired by the timelapse Daft Punk helmet build. As you can see in the video, they don’t have the entire visor made into a display, but the effect is quite nice, especially because it is multi color.
[Alex] put together this lovely minimal LED project. The square pixel matrix is soldered directly to the microcontroller in the same style as EMSL’s Micro-Readerboard. During the prototyping phase he used resistors to limit the current from the programming board. The final product doesn’t use resistors and manages the current draw by only turning on a single pixel line at a time. The illustrated assembly guide is very thorough and should help your create an equally compact device. Check out a video of it in motion below.
Researchers from Inverse Path showed a couple interesting techniques for sniffing keystrokes at CanSecWest. For their first experiments they used a laser pointed at the shiny back of a laptop. The keystrokes would cause the laptop to vibrate which they could detect just like they would with any laser listening device. They’ve done it successfully from anywhere between 50 to 100 feet away. They used techniques similar to those in speech recognition to determine what sentences were being typed.
In a different attack, they sniffed characters from a PS/2 keyboard by monitoring the ground line in an outlet 50 feet away. They haven’t yet been able to collect more than just single strokes, but expect to get full words and sentences soon. This leakage via power line is discussed in the 1972 Tempest document we posted about earlier. The team said it wasn’t possible with USB or laptop keyboards.
[Thanks Jeramy]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnUufutxAzQ]
[Barrett] sent in this hack he did to an airsoft pistol. He was using “tracer rounds” or glowing airsoft pellets and found that there was no commercially available way of charging them up with uv light before they are shot. He cracked open his pistol, removed the safety mechanism, and placed a UV led in it’s place. Now, when he turns it on, it charges up the pellets so they’re nice and bright. If he’s playing airsoft at night, won’t that bright purple light give away his position? yeah, we know he was probably just using that pistol to show the mod off.
[Rp181] has documented his entire rail gun build. He takes us through collecting the materials and assembling the system. It required 18 400V 3900uf capacitors to get the 5600 joules he wanted. It looks pretty impressive, though a video of it wreaking havoc on something might have been nice. We’ve seen rail guns before, from tiny ones for a robosapien to larger projects very similar to this one. In his instructable, he touts this as a “green” system. The capacitors are aluminum and no gun powder is required to move the projectile. Anyone want to do the math to figure out if it really is any better? Maybe if he’s collecting his energy via a giant solar panel.
[via instructables]
Joystiq has been tracking the new starlet of Xbox 360 failures: the E74 error. It appears as the lower right light on the console turning red and an on-screen message telling the user to contact support with the error E74. The number of reported E74 errors seems to have risen since August 2008 and people are wondering if the more recent increase in errors are related to the release of the New Xbox Experience (NXE) Dashboard update. Did Microsoft reclass Red Ring of Death (RROD) failures as E74 to avoid warranty replacements? Continue reading “Hackit: Xbox 360 Hardware Failures On The Rise?”
