Month: April 2011

Mini LED Message Board Built From Retro Displays

April 24, 2011 by 19 Comments

personal_electronic_retro_telegram

[Iain] is getting to the point in his life where he finds himself waxing nostalgic about various different technologies from his youth. One item he has always been fond of is first generation 7 segment consumer LED displays, like those found in old calculators.

He was excited to find one of these displays at the bottom of a box full of electronics odds and ends he received from a friend. After identifying the display and tracking down a data sheet online, he decided that he wanted to build some sort of little gadget out of it.

His first inclination was to build a tiny text scrolling gadget from the display, and thus his “Personal Electronic Retro Telegram” (P.E.R.T) was born. With Arduino in hand, he prototyped the circuit on a breadboard, then sent away to have some PCBs built. Once he received the boards, alll of his prototyping components were swapped out with SMD versions, including a TQFP ATMega168 chip in place of the full-sized Arduino board.

The final result is a nice melding old and new technology which he decided to give to his girlfriend as a gift. Continue reading to see a quick video of the P.E.R.T in action.

Continue reading “Mini LED Message Board Built From Retro Displays” →

Hacking Cakes With LEDs

April 23, 2011 by 25 Comments

led_cake

A large part of science is making mistakes and learning from them in order to make each subsequent design that much better. When your experimentation involves hacking cakes, each failure is an exercise in deliciousness.

[Craig] and his group of research partners often bake electronics-related cakes whenever part of the team departs in search of other opportunities. Over the years, farewell parties have seen renditions of anything from multimeters to quantum computers. This time around, he wanted to make something that contained actual electronics parts, while still remaining edible.

He settled on making an LED matrix inside of a cake, using silver foil wrapped licorice for wires. In the end however, he found the silver foil to be incredibly difficult to work with, and the matrix ended up being little more than a few randomly blinking LEDs.

Even though things didn’t work out quite how he planned, he is not discouraged. The cake was still quite tasty, and through this process he has discovered edible silver paint, which will undoubtedly make it into the next farewell cake.

Hacking Analog Phones For VOIP

April 23, 2011 by 30 Comments

analog_phone

[Tyler] has been using Google Voice extensively for some time now, but he hasn’t quite found a microphone/speaker setup he is happy with. He tried a headset, but that just didn’t do it for him.

While browsing around at his local thrift store, he came across an old Model 500 rotary phone for just a few dollars and decided it just might do the trick. Once disassembled, he mapped out the circuitry and got busy wiring up the handset to a pair of 3.5 mm stereo plugs – one each for the earpiece and microphone.

Once everything was reassembled, he hooked it up to his computer and gave it a spin – success!

While he is happy with how the phone works at the moment, he already has plans for improving it. He is currently looking for a way to use the handset hook to disconnect calls as well as a way to implement the rotary dial for number entry. We think that hacking a Bluetooth headset would easily take care of the first part, as well as eliminate the need for any sort of wired interface to his PC. It would also make it dead simple to use with any other Bluetooth-enabled device such as a cell phone.

We’re pretty sure he is open to implementation suggestions, so let us know what you think.

The LayerOne Hacking Conference Is Around The Corner

April 23, 2011 by 20 Comments

We just wanted to give a heads up to everyone to remind them that the annual layerOne hacking and security conference is coming up soon. They have announced their speaker line-up which includes talks on home monitoring, lockpicking, mobile malware and tons more. The event is located in Anaheim California on May 28-29.

They sent us sort of a press release with some information on the event and some details on the badge. You can read their email after the break.

Continue reading “The LayerOne Hacking Conference Is Around The Corner” →

Simple AVR Based GPS Tracker

April 23, 2011 by 7 Comments

The latest project from Lucidscience.com is a simple AVR based GPS tracker. As usual, the instructions here are quite in-depth including schematics and step by step procedures all the way down to modifying cables when necessary. What we found interesting is that the GPS module he’s using is so simple. It only requires 3 wires, one for power, one for serial communication, and one for a heartbeat.

For the microprocessor, he’s using an ATMega 324, which is a bit of processing overkill but he needed the SRAM for the GPS point storage. You could obviously expand to external storage but the goal here was to keep it extremely simple. Actually, there just isn’t a whole lot here other than the microprocessor, the GPS module, and a level converter. After wrapping up the circuit he goes on to explain how to get the data into Google Earth for display. After a few trips around the block you can see the results are quite nice.

Simple IR Bounce Tachometer

April 22, 2011 by 13 Comments

[Rajendra Bhatt] writes in to let us know about a nice simple IR bounce tachometer. The project uses a startUSB for PIC board and a 16×2 character LCD with a very basic Infrared bounce circuit.  Measuring either a reflective or non reflective spot in the rotating object, in this case a bit of white paper, the micro is supposedly capable of measuring up to 99,960 RPM (we think the paper might fly off at this point) with a resolution of 60 RPM. This is the same concept as a beam-break style tachometer but keeps all your electronics on one end of the spinning hazard.

The article also goes into detail about setting the PIC18F2550’s Timer0 register to enable 16-bit resolution.  The PIC is configured to turn on the infrared LED for one second, measure the number of pulses (through timer registers), and multiply that value by 60.  We would be more careful with the TMR0H and TMR0L counters as they have to be read and written in a certain order to preserve their values, but you’d need to be measuring upwards of 15,360 rpm to run into that error.

It is a quality writeup for anyone interested in learning about the start USB for PIC board, tachometers, or a new project. Thanks [Raj]!

Nerf Mind Bullets

April 22, 2011 by 9 Comments

[Chris] thinks that using your brain to control your trigger finger is a passé way of operating a toy firearm. Instead, he’s using his mind to fire foam bullets at whatever he thinks needs to pretend-die. To read his will, he’s chosen the Neurosky MindWave, a device that we just looked at for servo control. That hack shows how to patch into the USB dongle that comes with the device, but [Chris] opted to use a BlueSMiRF module from Sparkfun to connect the headset to an Arduino via Bluetooth.

The rest of the hack involves modifying the gun for automatic firing. It’s a Nerf Stampede, which takes six D-cells to power the electrical firing system. [Chris] didn’t want to carry that weight around in the body of the weapon itself so he installed a port for external power and added a firing mechanism at the same time. It uses relays to complete the circuit normally operated by the trigger. Now logic-level signals have no problem dispensing justice from the brightly-colored device.

[via Make]