Win Big: American Design Style

November 8, 2010 by James Munns 20 Comments

Last week we announced a Germany based design contest only accepting applicants from Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Unfortunately, this left out one of the larger segments of our readers. After doing some scrounging around (and a helpful tip from [Flash Gordon]), we managed to find a similar contest run by STMicroelectronics, the makers of the Discovery board. This contest sounds familiar, with free Discovery Board for all approved applicants, and prizes for the most interesting and creative projects. ~~Right now the official rules page seems to be missing, so you technically legally should probably wait to enter, but we can’t stop you.~~ It looks like the official rules page is located here. Thanks to [Andee] for pointing that out. Also, it looks like if you live in Puerto Rico or Quebec, you are also out of this contest as well.

If you are from the EMEA area and missed the last contest, be sure to go back and check it out for your chance to win! Also, we love covering contests (especially ones that give out free kits to all contestants), are there any readers out there that know of a developer other than STM that is offering this kind of deal? We would love to hear from you!

Make A Knitting Machine Print Pixel Art

November 8, 2010 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

[Becky Stern] shows how to take an old electronic knitting machine and interface it with a computer. After seeing the Brother KH-930E knitting machine in the video after the break it looks like the controls function quite like a CNC milling machine. Patterns can be programmed in and stored on a floppy disk. Since we don’t want to use those anymore (unless they’re hacked as an SD card carriage) it is nice to see that this is how the machine is connected to a computer. Using an altered FTDI cable and a floppy-drive emulator written in Python a blank design file can be saved on the knitting machine, manipulated in the computer to add your own pixel art, then loaded back onto the machine for production. At the very least, it’s interesting to watch the knitting happen, but fans of knitted apparel and geek paraphernalia must be salivating by now.

We’ve never given up our dream to transition from Hack-A-Day to Craft-A-Day, this just fuels the fire for that cause.

Continue reading “Make A Knitting Machine Print Pixel Art” →

Project Enclosures The Right Way

November 7, 2010 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

[Stephen Eaton] created an enclosure and shared his process in a pair of blog post. We thought is was amusing that he remarks on how rarely his projects get the to point that you’d want to make an enclosure for them. We’ve certainly got a lot of bare-PCB creations lying around. But when it does come time, we think his fabrication method is a good way to go.

First of all, he didn’t start from scratch. He already had a SparkFun project case sitting around. The problem is figuring how to make it work for your situation. We’ve used a drill, a Dremel, and a file in the past and that yields passable results but nothing that would be mistaken for anything other than a carefully mangled project box. [Stephen] decided to mill the openings he needed from the box, which yielded professional looking results. He started by emailing SparkFun and asking if they could give him a 3D model of the project box and the obliged. He then modeled the LCD screen, LED light pipes, button, USB port, and SD socket. From there it was off to the mill with a custom jig and a few tricks we think you’ll appreciate. The end result is just another reason to build the CNC mill you’ve had on your mind for so long.

IM-ME Plays Music In Preparation For Gaming

November 7, 2010 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

[Emmanuel Roussel] is coding a version of Tetris for the IM-ME. Before you get too excited, he hasn’t actually written the game yet, but instead started with the familiar theme music. The IM-ME has a piezo speak on board so it’s just a question of frequency and duration. [Emmanuel] developed an Open Office spread sheet that calculates each note’s frequency and the timer value needed to produce it. He then created a data type that stores a note and its duration and used an array of those structures to store the song. If you’ve ever wondered how to cleanly code music this is a wonderful example to learn from because right now the code doesn’t have anything other than that code to get in the way.

The ground work for this was established in the other hacks we’ve seen. Now we’re left wondering who will finish coding their game first. Will it be [Emmanuel’s] Tetris or [Travis’] Zombie Gotcha?

Water Use Feedback Changes Behavior

November 7, 2010 by Mike Szczys 26 Comments

How much water do you use when showering, or washing your hands, or washing the dishes? Not how much does the average person use, but how much to you use? That’s what the team over at Teague Labs set out to find with this water usage feedback system. The sensor used is a Koolance flow meter which is intended to measure coolant flow in PC liquid cooling systems. At $20, it makes a nice low-cost sensor which was paired with a WiFi enabled Arduino. In the image above they’re using an iPad as a screen so that you can see how much water you’re using (or wasting) as you wash your hands. This resulted in saving 1/2 gallon of water every time someone washed their hands.

The project code, schematic, and board files are all available for download. Along with the hardware build there’s some nice server-side software that gathers and graphs the data over time. We’ve seen a lot of power-meter hacks, but it’s nice to have the option to track water usage, even if this is tailored to just one tap at a time.

Exploit Bait And Switch

November 7, 2010 by James Munns 31 Comments

When a new virus or other piece of malware is identified, security researchers attempt to get a hold of the infection toolkit used by malicious users, and then apply this infection into a specially controlled environment in order to study how the virus spreads and communicates. Normally, these toolkits also include some sort of management console commonly used to evaluate successfulness of infection and other factors of the malware application. In the case of the EFTPS Malware campaign however, the admin console had a special trick.

This console was actually a fake, accepting a number of generic passwords and user accounts, and provide fake statistics to whoever looked in to it. All the while, the console would “call home” with as much data about the researcher as possible. By tricking the researchers in this way, the crooks would be able to stay one step ahead of anti-virus tools that would limit the effectiveness of any exploit. Thankfully though, the researchers managed to come out on top this time.

[via boingboing]

Your Mobile Phone, Now With 100% More RFID

November 7, 2010 by James Munns 15 Comments

More and more today, it is becoming harder to avoid having some sort of RFID tag in your wallet. [bunnie], of bunnie:studios decided to ease the clutter (and wireless interference) in his wallet by transplanting the RFID chip from one of his subway cards into his mobile phone. Rather than the tedious and possibly impossible task of yanking out the whole antenna, he instead pulled the antenna of a much more accessible wristband with an RFID chip of similar frequency instead. Nothing too technical in this hack, just a great idea and some steady handiwork. We recommend you try this out on a card you haven’t filled yet, just in case.