Month: March 2009

Standalone Eye-Fi Upload

March 15, 2009 by 14 Comments

eye-fi

Former Hack a Day contributor [Will] has been using a Eye-Fi SD card to automate his photo transfers. Unfortunately this requires using Eye-Fi’s software and talking to their servers. He used [Jeff Tchang]’s replacement server written in Python to recieve the images from the card. [Will] manages his own online photo gallery using Gallery 2. To get the images uploaded, he added a call to GUP. Now all of his photos are transfered just as easily as with the standard Eye-Fi but without all of the middleman.

[photo: Eye-Fi teardown]

Glowing Patch Cables

March 14, 2009 by 32 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi3lpVzM-bM]

[Sleepydog] just sent in this cool video of a patch cable he made with a built in EL wire. He’s using a Power over Ethernet router to control which ports have power. He states that this would allow easy identification of specific cables in the mess. While the proof of concept seems completely functional, and the idea is nice, we have to wonder if the cost to put in all the extra hardware would be worth it. Each cable would have to have its own inverter, not only driving up cost, but possibly adding interference. That does not mean we don’t want this desperately, we do. But we want it just because it looks cool. He needs to choreograph this to some music now and make his entire server room into a fancy display.

RFID Controlled Phone Dialing

March 14, 2009 by 19 Comments

phone1

In an attempt to create an easier to use interface for the elderly, [Stephen] has put together this phone prototype which uses RFID tags to dial. It is common for our motor skills and eyesight to deteriorate as we get older. There are special phones out there, but generally the only changes they make are enlarged buttons and louder speakers. [Stephen] had the idea to make a system where an elderly person would hold up a picture of the person to the phone and it would dial. He picked up an RFID card reader and an Arduino. The code for the RFID reader was already available, and with minor modifications to prevent multiple swipes from hand tremors or slow movements, he was able to get it working pretty fast. The Arduino then sends the data to an ioBridge to make the call.He’s using Google voice to physically place the call, so you could probably adapt this to other services as well. You can see a video of it in action after the break.

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AVR HV Rescue Shield

March 13, 2009 by 4 Comments

rescueshield

While playing with an ATmega168, [Jeff] programmed the RSTDISBL fuse bit. This pretty much makes the chip useless in most cases. [Jeff] didn’t want to give up on it though, so he built a system to program it using the rarely used high voltage parallel programming mode. He used an Arduino, a few lines of code and a few spare parts to make it. After sharing the idea with some fellow programmers, he decided to make an Arduino shield specifically for this purpose. You can use this to reset almost any fuse to rescue a chip. If you are a die hard AVR person and never started using Arduino instead, the STK500 actually has this built in.

3rd Generation IPod Shuffle Teardown

March 13, 2009 by 12 Comments

shuffle

You should all know the drill by now. New electronics hit the market and someone has to post pictures of it spread open bit by bit. The new shuffle is no different as iFixit shows us. There are some very nice pictures of the entire process. As you can see, most of the space is taken up by the battery. The thing that is probably most striking here is the main problem that many people have with it; there aren’t any buttons.

[via Makezine]

Apple Logo Secondary Monitor

March 13, 2009 by 22 Comments

macbook

MacMod member [EdsJunk] has modified the Apple logo on his MacBook to act as a second video display (cache). There’s a video embedded below showing it playing Quicktime videos and the iTunes visualizer. Unfortunately there aren’t any details of the hardware used. From the display settings, it looks to have a resolution of at least 640×480. We hope to see more details soon.

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