[andrew_h] has put together this slick anti theft device for his car. The RFID immobiliser is used to keep the car from starting unless you swipe an RFID tag. Depending on how well you hide it, and how well the person stealing the car knows you, they would have no reason to suspect that they have to swipe the tag. Even if someone steals the car while it is already running, they won’t be able to re start the engine if they shut it off. As usual, schematics and PCBs are available.
Cell phone chopper control
Control your tiny inexpensive helicopter with a Nokia N900. The chopper uses an infrared remote control, just like a television. Getting this to work was just a matter of figuring out the IR commands and writing an app for the phone to spit them out.
Fade to black; inconspicuously
Lost interest in your TV-B-Gone? Give it one last whirl by throwing it inside of an old iPod case. The dock connector hole is just about the right size for the LEDs and the kit fits nicely in the old 3G type iPods. With this kind of disguise it should be a lot harder to spot who’s messing with those TVs.
Surf your way to a cleaner house
This guy uses a roomba to clean his floors. The Wii balance board lets him lean forward and back to surf the little bot around the room. This seems a little more exciting than the exercise programs the board was originally designed for. [Thanks DXR]
G1 gamepad
[Tobias Weber] built a gamepad for the G1 Android phone. He used an old Atari control, cut out two buttons and the d-pad, and glued them in a housing to fit the G1 keyboard. Each presses a button on the phone’s keyboard which can be mapped through the emulator software.
Social power monitoring
Here you see a very small portion of the power meter installed in a Cafe at UC Berkeley. It shows the energy usage for the building, separated into categories such as lights, power outlets, and coffee machines. This lets students know how much juice they’re draining by plugging in their gadgets. The color bar uses 93 ShiftBrite modules controlled by an Arduino.
Finally a guitar that all of the arcade gaming geeks can jam with. [Mike Davenport] sent us his 8bit arcade based guitar for his senior project. Details are a little sparse if you intend to build you own at the moment, but he does mention the basics: such as it uses an FPGA for logic and function, the strings and joystick modify pitch, it has selectable waves and other parameters, and even includes save banks! Check out a video of him playing street fighter rocking out after the break. Continue reading “Part Arcade, Part Guitar”
The Alex eReader has been rooted. This little handheld was the belle of the ball at CES 2010 when it came to eReaders. Now that is has been released into the wild it takes its place next to the heavy hitters that have already seen root access. If you’re unfamiliar, this device boasts a six-inch e-ink display and a 320×240 LCD touchscreen interface. Now that you can make it do your bidding, what are your plans for the $350 tablet? Let us know in the comments.
[Thanks Richard]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDaNkff5Yyg]
Apod walks! If you recall, last year we discovered Apod, the creepy lifelike hexapod creation made by [Zenta]. At that point in time, it basically just shifted around nicely but didn’t do much walking. Well, [Zenta] has been hard at work since then and now Apod is fully active, walking, running, and serving drinks with smooth motion. Want to learn more about how his inverse kinematics work? Check out this thread.
[thanks Weaz]
If you can fabricate single-sided circuit boards at home you can build this digital oscilloscope. It uses mostly through-hole components with just a couple of surface mount chips to contend with. An ATmega162 handles the hardware end of things with a CPLD used to manage the sampling rate. Data is displayed on a 240×128 LCD display which will be the most expensive component to acquire. It’s still a lot cheaper than buying a commercially available oscilloscope, even if you get a base model and hack it to unlock all the features.
[Thanks Juan]
[Sprite_tm] dusted off his assembly skills and managed to emulate a Z80 computer using an AVR ATmega88. He’s using an SD card in place of the floppy and a 128 KB DRAM chip to handle the memory for the emulated machine. An FT232 board gives him terminal access which he uses for input and display. As you can see, the hardware is much simpler than building the original would have been. He makes up for this with complicated firmware. In the end, the emulated core occupies about 2 KB of programming space after he followed the Z80 Propeller project’s idea of dividing the instructions into different modules and using a lookup table to access them.
