Day: August 29, 2011

MindFlex Watches As You Judge Others By Sight Alone

August 29, 2011 by 11 Comments

mindflex_headset

[Paul] really wanted to know what his brain was thinking.

No, really. He is aware of all the thoughts that come and go, but he wanted to know what was going on in his brain below his conscious thought stream. Armed with a MindFlex headset and a Teensy, he set out to decode what really was going on inside his head.

He spent a month crawling 35 million Google profiles, downloading each user’s pictures into a MySQL database. The Teensy was attached to the MindFlex sensor board, and collects all of the headset’s output over a serial connection.

His experiment consisted of flashing each of the profile pictures on his monitor for one second, recording 2 of the 11 available brainwave channels from the MindFlex. These values were then plotted out so that he could visualize the “Attention” and “Meditation” values captured by the headset. At the end of the day he discovered, interestingly enough, that looking at dogs relaxed him the most!

We would love to see what correlations could be drawn from his collected data, and what sorts of “hidden” thoughts are coursing through others’ brains. It could certainly end up being a double-edged sword, uncovering subconscious biases and other such things, but it’s an incredibly intriguing experiment to say the least.

Be sure to check out the video below of the experiment in progress.

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Video: Learning Eagle CAD Part I – Schematic & Custom Parts

August 29, 2011 by 33 Comments

This week we are starting in on a series of videos that are pretty different from the past few. Most hackers go through a phase where they etch their own circuit boards. This lasts for a few projects until they need to use a surface mount part, need many circuit boards to be made, or just don’t have the time needed to do everything themselves. In this video [Jack] starts a multi-part series about how to use Eagle CAD, which is a program that allows you to design your own circuit boards that you can then send out to be manufactured. Eagle CAD has a free version of their software that fits just perfectly with a beginner’s budget. There are other free layout programs out there but this one is arguably the best. Eagle CAD has a steeper learning curve than others but has some pretty powerful features to justify the extra effort that you have to expend to get going with it.

This video starts showing the schematic and library portions of the program. We have also added several supplementary videos on our YouTube channel that explain some of the tools in the tool palette in greater detail.

Announcing The Next Theme: Engine Hacks

August 29, 2011 by 40 Comments

Engine Hacks Theme banner

We had some interesting High Voltage posts over the past couple of weeks. Today we are announcing the next theme: Engine Hacks. Each day for the next two weeks we will be doing a new post about some sort of interesting engine project. We’ll be showing projects where engines are built from scratch, engines are modified to work in a new way, or where an engine is used in an manner that it wasn’t originally intended. If you or someone you know has an interesting project that you think might fit well within this category, please let us know through our tip line.

Pictured above is an EVIC (Electronic Valve Internal Combustion) engine. This type of engine doesn’t have a cam shaft to actuate the valves. Solenoids are used instead and are paired with a small processor and some sensors to determine when and how long to open the valves. This type of engine allows you to do things like vary the amount of fuel coming into the cylinder on a continually variable basis. If you paired this with electronic ignition, you could even make the engine run in reverse!

Run Unsigned Code On Any Xbox

August 29, 2011 by 30 Comments

A ton of people sent in the latest development on the Xbox homebrew front. A console hacker that goes by the name of [GliGli] released a new exploit that boots any Xbox into a Linux loader.

The hack requires some hardware – in this case an Xilinx CLPD. The hack works by sending a tiny reset pulse (no word on what ‘tiny’ means) that glitches the hardware and gets around the hash checks during boot. If that’s not technical enough for you, check out the readme on the project’s github.

This isn’t a silver bullet to cracking Xboxen wide open. The glitch only has about a 25% chance of success for each boot. The glitch also take a few minutes to boot into unsigned code. This being said, the hack works on all 360s, including the slim models that can’t be opened up with the JTAG method.

Check out the demo of one of the beta testers demonstrating the exploit after the break. Again, thanks to everyone for sending this one in.

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