AVR Dragon Wiring Alternative

September 26, 2009 by Mike Szczys 23 Comments

dragon_jumper_board

We love our AVR Dragon programmer. It is a small board with a lot of functionality: in-circuit serial programming, JTAG, debug wire, and high voltage serial programming. Unfortunately, out of the box it is not quite ready for action. The Dragon ships with an unpopulated prototyping area and missing a pin header for the HVSP. For most people this means soldering on pin headers and a ZIF socket then jumpering between the various programming headers and the header for the socket. Tired of working with jumper wires, [Jussi] designed a small PCB to make the connections (original link in Finnish). Continue reading “AVR Dragon Wiring Alternative” →

Halloween Prop: The Ground-breaker

September 26, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 28 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46RycwjIvs8]

[casafear1] has put out this video detailing how to build the “ground-breaker”, a zombie escaping from the grave. It is a simple frame for the arms and shoulders, with a couple pneumatic pistons to make it jerk as though it were pulling itself from the grave. He goes into a decent amount of detail explaining the physical construction, offering several tips to prolong the life of this prop. Unfortunately, he doesn’t enlighten us as to his control scheme. Is it manually controlled? Is it automated? Does it get activated by passers by or is it always going?

Last year, we posted most of the Halloween projects after Halloween. This year we would like to try to get you those ideas and inspiration far enough ahead of time to help you put them to use. Send us your favorite Halloween projects so we can get them published.

[via Makezine]

SLI Anytime Anywhere

September 25, 2009 by Jakob Griffith 37 Comments

slin_b

SLI, for those who don’t know, is the process of taking two Nvidia graphics cards and allowing them to work in parallel to render to a single monitor. In theory this doubles the power, getting more FPS for video games. Great right? Except due to encryption, only a limited amount of motherboards can actually support SLI.

That is, until now. Russian hackers at xDevs discovered that the newer encryption is based around string identifiers. This can be modified within the operating system itself, so in theory any motherboard could work. Be wary, this could brick your system; but if successful, you’ll have more power without shelling out for an officially SLI supported motherboard.

140 Db Alarm Clock Hack

September 25, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 37 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zEH5GxPNO8]

This silly little video caught our attention. It is an alarm clock, hacked with two amazingly loud car horns. They are using a laptop power brick to push the two external car horns. The horns are triggered by a relay wired to the internal speaker of the alarm clock. This is a super quick project that could be done, not only to help yourself, but it is the perfect amount of effort for a prank. We bet you guys could probably wire one of these up and hide the horns in only a few minutes. If you are having problems waking up, you might also want to check out some of the other alarm hacks we’ve seen.

[via gizmodo]

Arduino Thermoscanner

September 25, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 25 Comments

thermoscanner2

[Steve] sent in a tip to show us his Thermography scanner. Constructed from an Arduino, two servos, a thermal sensor and a little bit of code, it is fairly simple. The results aren’t groundbreaking. You can see his examples are fairly low resolution and took about 30 seconds to capture. It isn’t bad for a quick project though. The source code is available on his site.

Radio Controlled Beetle Flight Footage

September 25, 2009 by Mike Szczys 33 Comments

Earlier this year we were amazed when University of California researchers controlled a beetle via electrical implants. The video available at the time of the original report showed beetles tethered in place while electrical stimuli was applied via the chip. New video of free flight is has now been posted. Although the motion is rather sporadic, it is obvious that simple commands to start flight, stop flight, and turn left or right are having their intended effect. Check out this cyborg action after the break. Is DARPA one step closer to unleashing legions of insect warriors on unsuspecting masses? Continue reading “Radio Controlled Beetle Flight Footage” →

Eee PC Bios Resurrection

September 25, 2009 by Mike Szczys 22 Comments

flashsolderedtoboard

Hot on the heels of our post about reading passwords from EEPROM, [n0th1n6] tipped us off about a similar hack used to resurrect an Eee PC from a bad bios flash. After discovering that a factory repair for a dead bios costs about $200, [CutenaCute_7] took on the challenge herself. She disassembled the computer and desoldered the bios chip from the board. After writing a program to flash the chip using C#, she temporarily soldered jumpers to make sure the flash worked. Looks like this is a zero cost hack, plus the time savings from not having to ship her computer somewhere. Bravo.