Kickstarter Roundup: Wednesday, June 1st

June 1, 2011 by Mike Nathan 21 Comments

We have been getting tons of emails lately recommending we take a look at various Kickstarter projects. We used to ignore them since they all boil down to a request for project funding, but since there are so many cool projects out there, we figured we might as well share a couple. Some of these projects have already met their funding goals, but we thought they were worth a mention anyhow.

Solar Powered Coffee Roasting

solar_coffee_roaster

We’re all about both coffee and alternative energy, so this one caught our eye right away. While this coffee roaster won’t exactly fit on your back porch, it would be perfect for a coffee shop located in a sunny locale. Based off “power tower” solar concentrator systems, this rooftop-mounted solar harvester has big potential. Pair this with sopme sustainably-grown coffee, and you’ve got quite the tasty combo.

HexBright – an open source flashlight

hexbright

What do you get when you combine milled aluminum hex bar and a Cree XM-L LED? A lightweight, extremely bright flashlight that won’t roll away on you. The HexBright puts out 500 lumens and sports a built-in rechargeable battery that can be topped off via your computer’s USB port. Not only that, the high-end version can be programmed to support any pattern or brightness that you choose. We’ll take two, thanks.

Arduino Project Board

arduino_project_board

[Randy Sarafan] of Clap-off bra fame is working on a slimmed-down Arduino board for use in the final stages of project development. He really doesn’t see the need to put an entire Arduino development board into his finished projects and often makes a quick perfboard circuit for his builds once he is finished prototyping. He’s grown tired of the process and developed a small circuit board that has all the connectivity he needs, without all the extra bits found on Arduino development boards.

Sinister Tone Generator Brings The Bass

June 1, 2011 by Mike Nathan 8 Comments

sinster_tone_generator

[RichDecibels] wrote in to share a new device he built called the “Sinster Tone Generator”. It’s basically a bass drone synthesizer that uses two pairs of heterodyning oscillators to generate the output. If you swing by his site, he has a long audio demo of the device in action with a bit of reverb and filtering applied to enhance the sound. After listening, we agree that it sounds pretty sinister!

The device is relatively small and handsomely packaged in a plastic project box he had custom cut by Ponoko. [Rich] says that this particular unit is a one-off that he has produced for a charity auction, and that bidding is open through Sunday if you really want to get your hands on it. If you happen to have the time to build one yourself, he has uploaded schematics and layout files to his site (as usual), so feel free to stop by and grab a copy.

GPU Password Cracking Made Easy

June 1, 2011 by Mike Szczys 37 Comments

The power that a Graphics Processing Unit presents can be harnessed to do some dirty work when trying to crack passwords. [Vijay] took a look at some of the options out there for cracking passwords and found that utilizing the GPU produces the correct password in a fraction of the time. On a Windows machine he pitted the Cain password recovery tool which uses the CPU for its calculations against ighashgpu which uses ATI or Nvidia graphics cards to do the deed. Hands down ighashgpu is the fastest; with Cain taking about one year to crack an eight character password while ighashgpu can do it in under nineteen hours.

We were very interested to see how easy it is to use this package. We looked in on GPU cracking in September but didn’t focus on the software packages that are out there. Now that you know how easily your password can be unearthed perhaps you will get some use out of this article discussing the usability and security of longer passwords which we ran across over on Reddit.

[Jeri’s] Dress Lights Up When Someone Invades Her Personal Space — Step Back Nerds!

June 1, 2011 by Mike Szczys 34 Comments

[Jeri] threw down the geeky fashion gauntlet by building this LED enhanced dress. She chose to assemble the project for her trip to BarBot 2011, and we can’t think of a more appropriate setting for such a garment. It uses a motion sensor to set off a delayed pattern of blue lights hidden underneath the fabric.The best part of the hack is the instamatic camera. It looks like a fashion accessory, but it’s really hiding all of the circuitry for the lights.

Inside the camera a PIR sensor waits until it detects motion, sending a signal through an op-amp to the trigger circuitry. A 74LS14 Schmitt Trigger chip teams up with some resistor-capacitor timer circuits to build a delay chain for the LEDs. This way, after motion is detected the LEDs come on and off in a staggered pattern that doesn’t require a microcontroller and is very pleasing to the eye. See the Analog win for yourself after the break.

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Buying, Selling, And Bartering Hacking Hardware

June 1, 2011 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

Regular reader [Grenadier] wrote in to let us know about his newly published hacking hardware trading post called The Junkbox. Apparently when he’s not blowing up capacitors or building his own high voltage ones, he makes time to code up a website where you can buy, sell, and barter leftover components.

We have something like this right here at Hackaday. The dollar sign icon along the right column, just underneath the featured posts banner will take you to our classifieds section which at the time of writing had a whopping nine items posts. But these things to ebb and flow. Check in on the newly posted link from time to time to see that number grow.

Whether it’s over at The Junkbox or in our classifieds section, we think the biggest problem is finding what you need when you need it. This is nothing new. If you missed it before, we’ve embedded an older episode of the EEVblog after the break where [Dave Jones] tours Apex Surplus. It’s as if a hacker who has hoarding tendencies bought a store forty years ago and just kept piling more and more merchandise to the sky.

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Prototyping The New Office Clock

June 1, 2011 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

[Damage] was tapped to build a new clock to hang on the wall at the office. He got a hold of some 6.5 inch seven segment displays for the hours and minutes, as well as some 4.5 inch modules for the date and month. Rather than jump right in with the large hardware (especially because he’s waiting for the PCB order to arrive) he built this prototype with more commonly sized displays.

His build is Arduino powered. In the video after the break he mentions the temperature compensated crystal oscillator that keeps the time. We’d wager that’s the DS3234 based RTC module that Sparkfun sells. This is the same chip family as the Chronodot and it was our choice for the Ping Pong Clock.

The finished clock will hang high on wall, out of reach when you need to set the time. This shouldn’t need to be done much – if ever – since that RTC includes a backup battery. But [Damage] took the time to develop a remote programming device anyway. Using another Arduino, an LCD display, and an Xbee pair he whipped up a remote that can be used to navigate and change the main unit’s settings.

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Devil Horns Adorn The Hood Of My Truck

June 1, 2011 by Mike Szczys 31 Comments

When you’re hunting zombies you’ve got to give them something to fear. [Shannon Larratt] is getting ready for that eventuality by adding devil horns as his hood ornament. It looks awesome from afar, but when you see the close-up images you realize how lifelike this is. That’s because it’s not a sculpture. [Shannon] cast the ornament in a mold made from his own hand.

The process started with some dental alginate which he slobbered all over his hand as he held the devil horns pose. After the mold had hardened he cast the ornament using fast-curing black plastic resin.

With the ornament now in hand he needed a way to secure it to the hood of his vehicle. He picked up a threaded U-bolt. A hole and a slot were carved in the base of the ornament to receive the U-bold and a straight bolt for a trio of anchor points. More of the black resin fills the holes, securing the bolts and making it a snap to mount the ornament by drilling through the hood.

We also find it awesome that during this process [Shannon] took the time to cast his daughter’s fist for use as a door knob at home.