Converting A Lame Tron Toy Into A Cool Halloween Costume Prop

August 27, 2011 by Mike Nathan 12 Comments

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Instructable user [cubeberg’s] daughter saw Tron:Legacy earlier this year and decided right then and there that she wanted to dress up as Quorra for Halloween. Being the awesome dad he is, he decided to make her costume himself, and hit the stores in search of an Identity Disc to complete the look.

The toy was pretty underwhelming, and lacked the lighting that a proper Tron prop should have. He figured he had the skills to make it a bit better, so he gathered some tools, a bunch of LEDs, and set off for his workshop. He gutted the disc, cutting out any extraneous bits of plastic he could find. He wired up 64 LEDs between the disc’s inner and outer ring, which he controls using an ATmega 328 paired with a Max7221 display driver.

He doesn’t show any pictures of what the toy looked like beforehand, but the final product looks great. We bet that his daughter is pretty pumped for Halloween to roll around – we know we would be.

Continue reading to see a quick video demo of his souped up Identity Disc in action.

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Vowel Recognition Using An ATmega644

August 27, 2011 by Mike Szczys 3 Comments

[Youchun Zhang] and [Annie (Wei) Dai] found a way to differentiate vowel sounds using an ATmega644 as their final project for a microcontroller design class. Voice recognition is not out of the ordinary, but most of the time it uses a computer, smart phone, or specially designed hardware. This implementation uses an ATmega644, a microphone connected via an op-amp, and a few buttons. In the demonstration after the break you’ll see that they’re outputting status data to Putty via an RS232 connection, but that’s just so you can see what’s going on inside the chip. It’s what’s doing all of the hard work.

In order to tell the difference between vowels, the waveforms of each sound were analyzed using MATLAB during the research phase. That analysis allowed the team to assemble data for each sound that contained the peaks least often found in the other sounds. Now the microcontroller analyzes incoming sound, comparing it to that data set. The analysis is snappy, happening in real-time thanks to the team’s use of the Fast Walsh Transform. It turns the sound into a set of square waves and presents them as a 64 bit sample. The result can be used as a password protection scheme, but as far as we can tell this doesn’t key to just one person, anyone who knows the vowels of the password can use it.

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Weekly Roundup 8/27/2011

August 27, 2011 by Jack Buffington No comments

In case you missed them, here are our biggest posts from the past week.

For the weapons enthusiasts in our audience, make sure to check out our most popular post this week where [Liquider] shows a project in which an airsoft pistol was converted into a coil gun.

Our next most popular post was based around an xkcd comic where the concept of viewing clouds in 3D is explored using a pair of webcams. This post had lots of comments and also spawned a forum topic.

Next up is a post about a reward that has been place on the head of porting Android to run on a HP Touchpad. The bounty for all of the various challenges was originally $1500 but now sits at $2275!

This isn’t our normal fare since we usually don’t cover hacking that could be malicious. This post describes some of the exploits covered recently at Black Hat and Defcon.

Finishing up the pack is our own video where [Jack] shows how to build a stun glove and proves that it works by taking a jolt from it himself.

High Voltage Hacks: Transmute The Elements In Your Garage

August 27, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

The magnum opus of alchemy was the Philosopher’s stone, a substance that was able to turn common metals into gold. Unlike alchemists, [Carl Willis] might not be poisoning himself in a multitude of ways, but he did build a Farnsworth fusor that’s capable of turning Hydrogen into Helium.

To fuse Hydrogen in his device, [Carl] first evacuates a vacuum chamber. Deuterium (Hydrogen with an added neutron) is injected into the chamber, and a spherical cathode made of Tungsten is charged to 75 kV. The deuterium gas is heated and confined by the cathode and fuses into Helium. The electrostatic confinement of the plasma isn’t very much different from some old CRT tubes. This isn’t a coincidence – both the fusor and CRTs were invented by the same man.

While no fusion experiments – including some billion dollar experiments – have ever produced a net energy gain, this doesn’t mean it’s not an impressive engineering feat. If you’d like to try your hand at building your own fusor, drop by the surprisingly active research forum. There’s a lot of really good projects to look through over there.

Hacking [Steve Jobs]: A Retrospective

August 26, 2011 by Mike Nathan 32 Comments

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Provided you haven’t been toiling away in a secret lair somewhere (we’re looking at you [Jack]), odds are you may have seen the news that [Steve Jobs] stepped down as CEO of Apple this past Wednesday.

This earth-shattering news even eclipsed that of the East Coast Megaquakeapocalypse. It sent the blogosphere into a tizzy, sparking a whirlwind of news posts and retrospectives on his career. It’s been impossible to ignore the coverage (we’ve tried), and since we see everyone else writing about it, we feel the need to be at least somewhat up on our current events as well.

At the end of the day though, we don’t care how many patents [Steve] owns, how many failed products he has dreamed up over the years, or that he and [Woz] used to wear matching thongs to the beach in the 80s*.

Nope, we just care about the hacks. So here’s a trip down memory lane highlighting the Apple-related hacks we’ve seen so far in 2011, which will forever be known as the year [Steve Jobs] gave up the reigns at Apple (again).

*Bald-faced lie

XBMC on iOS Devices

Overhauling an old Apple keyboard

Mac Pro serial terminal

Taking secret photos of Apple Store patrons

Apple ][ USB keyboard conversion

Apple ][ Weather Display Parts 1, 2, 3

Making Oscilloscopes From ARM Development Boards

August 26, 2011 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

If you’ve got an ARM development board gathering dust in the corner of your shop, perhaps you could repurpose it as an oscilloscope. [Arend-Paul Spijkerman] was able to use an mbed and LPCXpresso as the hardware end of an oscilloscope. He didn’t use a standalone screen as a display, instead opting to push the scope readings from the hardware to a computer for display. This was greatly simplified by using StampDock as a basis for the GUI.

His circuit diagrams calls for an RS-232 connection for the LPCXpresso but not for the mbed. We’re not quite familiar enough with the mbed to know why, but perhaps those in the know can clue us in by leaving a comment. The probe connections are quite simple, each made up of a voltage divider and a pair of diodes. But the breadboard above looks much busier because it has two oscilloscope circuits built on it, and there’s a 10 MHz clock and a 4040 ripple counter which were used to provide a test signal.

Installing OpenSSH On The HP TouchPad

August 26, 2011 by Mike Nathan 21 Comments

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[Russ] was lucky enough to get his hands on a deeply discounted HP TouchPad, and after hearing about the huge bounty being offered for getting Android up and running on the device, he decided to poke around and see if he could make some headway.

He started off by making a full backup copy of his file system using a tool HP has on their WebOS site, just in case anything unfortunate happened to his device in the process. He grabbed a copy of the ARM cross-compiler and set off to build a copy of OpenSSH for the TouchPad. Once he had the binaries in hand, he started what he thought would be the arduous process of getting SSH onto the TouchPad, but it turned out that it was a simple drag and drop operation.

After remounting the file system to allow write operations, he fired up the SSH daemon and hoped for the best. It worked like a charm, and while it’s a relatively small part of getting Android running on the TouchPad, every bit helps.