A Cat Elevator, For The Discerning Lazy Feline In Your Life

August 29, 2011 by Mike Nathan 36 Comments

Ah, to live the life of a cat. The lazing about, the food delivered on demand, and the elevators – oh the glorious elevators.

No you didn’t misread and we haven’t gone crazy. We were sent a link to the video below just the other day, and while it is nearly two years old, it was new to us. From the very brief description on YouTube, it looks as if the elevator senses the cat’s entry using infrared, locking the door behind the cat before transporting it to another level of the house. While it’s often implied that cats are incredibly lazy, this contraption definitely takes things above and beyond the norm.

It’s a pretty ridiculous system if you ask us, but it’s pretty compelling just the same. If you can find any more information on it, we’d love to hear about it in the comments. If you can’t, feel free to speculate as to how you would build a cat elevator, or elaborate on the crazy contraptions you’ve built for the lazy felines in your life.

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MindFlex Watches As You Judge Others By Sight Alone

August 29, 2011 by Mike Nathan 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 Jack Buffington 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 Jack Buffington 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 Brian Benchoff 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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BASIC Programming On An Arduino

August 28, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 96 Comments

[Mike] sent in a project he’s been working on – a port of a BASIC interpreter that fits on an Arduino. The code is meant to be a faithful port of Tiny BASIC for the 68000, and true to Tiny BASIC form, it fits in the very limited RAM of the Arduino.

True to Tiny BASIC’s assembler roots, [Mike]’s C port makes extensive use of the “infinitely-abusable” goto statement. Kernighan and Ritchie said themselves, “code involving a goto can alway be written without one” but [Mike] found that using goto left a lot more room available for BASIC code. The BASIC interpreter eats up around 600 bytes in the Arduino RAM, leaving about 1.4 kB for BASIC code. Not much, but more than the lowest-end BASIC Stamp.

[Mike] says he started this project to see how ‘old bearded ones’ conjured up so many impressive programs with a few kB of RAM. Tiny BASIC was originally conceived for the Altair 8800 that shipped with 256 bytes of RAM stock, so it seemed like a perfect fit. Right now, all we know is we’ll be spending the weekend digging through our copies of Dr. Dobb’s Journal.

Build A Clock Using Dials Instead Of Hands

August 28, 2011 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

[Doug Paradis] found a simple way to use dials instead of hands on a clock. Actually, that’s pretty much the entire hack… use dials instead of hands. He grabbed a battery-operated clock movement from the hobby store, then printed out one dial for hours, another for minutes, robert’s your mother’s brother, and you’ve got a new clock. The case seen above is laser cut, with a window and index line that helps you read the time precisely.

But instead of building a case, we’d like to try this with some retro equipment. The first thing that pops to mind is to replace the disks on a broken strobotuner, like the big-dialed model that Conn used to make. If you’re not down with the bulky music hardware-turned-clock perhaps there’s an old multi-meter, or a panel gauge that can be repurposed for this. We know [Doug] already has some needle meters sitting around that would be perfect for this.