[Aaron Nelson] tipped us off about a simple hack to use an iPad SIM with an iPhone. You won’t be able to use the iPhone as a phone, but the relatively cheap $29.99 for unlimited Internet was his goal. He used an old plastic gift card to cut out an adapter for the iPad’s micro SIM so that it will fit into the iPhone’s SIM cradle as seen above. From there he used a web service via the WiFi connection to enter “Broadband” as a custom APN.
Day: May 14, 2010
Cat Door Unlocks Via Facial Recognition
Faced with critters trying to get in and a cat that loved to show them her latest kill, the folks at Quantum Picture came up with a system that unlocks the cat door based on image recognition. As you can see above, it uses a camera to capture the profile of anything approaching the cat door. That image is compared to stored positive identification sets, making up a feline positive identification protocol. Don’t think this is necessary? In the writeup there’s a couple of images showing the outline of a skunk. Sounds like this system is a necessity.
We wonder if this lucky cat also has an Internet enabled cat feeder?
[Thanks Stephen]
Electromechanical Game: Running With The Bulls
[vime0 =http://vimeo.com/11700747]
We’ve been watching the progress of this build for a while on Flickr. It looks like they’ve finally completed the electromechanical game, Running with the bulls. Based off of the event by the same name, you have to keep your guy from being trampled by the bulls as the charge. The entire bull structure is pulled forward on a timing chain with a stepper motor with each bulls individual side to side movement being servo driven. It actually looks kind of fun.
Biopunk Watch: Time, Temperature, Gaming
[Matthew Garten] built this watch based on an Arduino. The face is a small color display which allows you to choose to show time in digital, binary, or analog formats. In keeping with the recent trend here on Hackaday he has a glove-based add-on that has temperature sensors in the fingers; for Firefighters or those with nerve damage to their fingers (we’re thinking Darkman). For entertainment in any situation he’s included a trackball and the ability to play breakout or draw in 16-bit color. Details are scarce but apparently he’ll be sharing more soon. For now, watch the video after the break and think of ways to shrink this down into a nice package like the Pong Watch enjoys.