Marc Weber Tobias Vs Medeco

May 22, 2009 by Eliot 20 Comments

tobias

This month’s Wired magazine has an extensive profile of [Marc Weber Tobias]. He’s a professional lock picker that delights in coming up with new techniques for taking on high security locks. In recent years, he’s run afoul of the US’s premier high security lock manufacturer, Medeco, by publishing Open in Thirty Seconds with [Tobias Bluzmanis]. Medeco still denies that this is even possible. Wired decided to to test the team by purchasing six new cylinders and timing them. Each one was open in under nine minutes. You can see a video of this on Wired’s site.

Last fall we covered a decoding attack against Medeco locks by [Jon King].

[via blackbag]

Golf Cart Modding For R/C

May 22, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 27 Comments

[blip.tv ?posts_id=2133808&dest=-1]

After making a few units for the new Discovery t.v. show called Weaponizers, [Jeremy] decided to release this video showing how to modify a golf cart for radio control. The radio and controller are basic off the shelf R/C gear, running some linear actuators.
[thanks Divide]

Weather Canvas

May 22, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 7 Comments

weather

Another Cornell final project, Weather Canvas aims to make watching the weather a little more pleasant. Data is captured via a thermometer, humidity sensor, anemometer, and a Hotwheels radar gun turned precipitation sensor. Once it’s captured, it’s transmitted to the LED matrix inside which displays pretty patterns to convey the weather conditions. They have set images, like icons, that mean different things.

IFob: Keyless Entry

May 22, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 25 Comments

iFOB-11-M (Custom)

[Nate] hates keys. He’s gone through a lot of effort to remove them wherever possible. He has a keypad at home and a keypad at work, but he still has to carry car keys. His solution is to build a device he can carry in his pocket that will unlock the car via RF. To do this, he’s utilizing the guts of a Nike iPod puck along with an Arduino and an iPod serial board. He has managed to get this all working, but still has to carry his key to actually start the car. We know what his next project will be.

Laser Cut Drum Kit

May 22, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 14 Comments

drums

[Segwaymonkey] picked up an arduino based drumkit circuit and needed a kit to place it on. He worked up a pretty cool design and had it laser cut out of acrylic. The cool part of the design is how he delt with the head motion of the drum. Each head has 4 “springs” that were also cut from the acrylic. The Arduino based drum circuit sits on a little pedestal in the middle, as though it were on display. We really like the design, but we have to wonder if a little noise dampening on the heads might be a good idea. He hasn’t released the plans, but says he might once he gets it perfect.