Day: August 15, 2015

Hacking An SD Slot For WiFi

August 15, 2015 by 28 Comments

Back in the 1990’s moving files via a floppy disk was known as “sneaker net.” While floppies are a thing of the past, SD Cards are the modern equivalent and they still lend themselves to sneaker net operations.

But why? WiFi is everywhere now. Wouldn’t it be great if you could hack those devices with SD slots to use WiFi? Apparently 3D printer [extrud3d] thought the same thing and found a way to reconfigure a Toshiba FlashAir card to put his 3D printer on the network.

The card is aimed at consumers, so by default it creates a hotspot and waits for a connection, a rudimentary web app allows you to move files back and forth over the network to the SD card which is then read by the host device. However, [extrud3d] shows how to modify a file on the SD card’s file system to allow the device to hook up to an existing wireless network and also provides a Python script to make the file transfer easier.

Although this hack is for a 3D printer, it ought to work with most devices that have a full sized SD slot (or can be adapted to take a full sized card). Since the hack is nothing more than changing a text file, it is a lot easier than some other SD hacks we’ve covered. Over on hackaday.io, [Chris Jones] has recently done some hacking on the FlashAir and has a list of its shell commands if you want to go beyond the text file hacks.

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Tiny Robot Shakes Head At You In Disapproval

August 15, 2015 by 5 Comments

If you don’t have enough things staring at you and shaking their head in frustration, [Sheerforce] has a neat project for you. It’s a small Arduino-powered robot that uses an ultrasonic distance finder to keep pointing towards the closest thing it can find. Generally, that would be you.

When it finds something, it tries to track it by constantly rotating the distance finder slightly and retesting the distance, giving the impression of constantly shaking its head at you in disappointment. This ensures that you will either unplug it or smash it with a hammer after a very short time, but you should read [Sheerforce]’s code first: it’s a great example of documenting this for experimenters who want to build something that offers more affirmations of your life choices.

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Covert Cricket Score Tracker Gets Around Office Rules

August 15, 2015 by 15 Comments

[Rohit Gupta] was looking for a stealthy way to keep up with the scores for his favorite game: cricket. Unfortunately, his office blocked access to most sites where he could watch the game, so he came up with a covert way to track the score on a small LCD screen. Using a Raspberry Pi and the web scraping program BeautifulSoup, he wrote a program that grabbed the score once a minute, and displayed it on a screen salvaged from a Nokia 5510 cell phone, driven through the Adafruit 5510 Python display library. Web scraping is a technique where a program grabs a web page, scrapes all of the content off it and processes it so only the data that is needed remains.

[Rohit] doesn’t name the web site that he scraped the score from, but there are two good reasons for that. Firstly, this hack relies on his office not blocking it, and secondly, many web sites frown on web scraping like this, as doing it too often can overload their servers, and you obviously don’t see the ads that the site is running. So, it is a technique that should be used with some caution. That aside, this is  a great example of a stealthy way to display information that you want to track, but without obnoxious (and obvious) alerts popping up on screen. And, given that cricket games can often go on for several days, that’s a good way to keep track of the game you love and keep your job.

Need a little primer on web scraping? Check out this guide.

Saving 25,000 Electronics Manuals And Could Use Help

August 15, 2015 by 27 Comments

Textfiles.com is the largest repository of BBS archives and digital writings in the world, and admin [Jason Scott] has a nearly single-minded devotion to saving the documents of and relating to our electronic age. Now, he’s in a bit of a pickle. He found 25,000 manuals for all kinds of electronic items. The collection goes back to the 30s, [Jason] wants to save them, and the current owner of the collection needs the space. Have you ever noticed how terrible books are to move?

Included in this collection just outside Baltimore, MD are thousands of manuals for various pieces of equipment going back to the 1930s. There are Tektronix manuals, HP manuals, and instructions and schematics for equipment that hasn’t been made in a very, very long time. [Jason] put up a Flickr gallery of the library in all its glory. There’s bound to be some very interesting stuff in there.

Of course the acquisition of tens of thousands of out of print manuals will never go smoothly. [Jason] needs to start emptying out the shelves on Monday. The current plan is to go through all the manuals, remove the duplicates, and shuffle them over to a storage unit about a mile away until they can be dealt with properly. If you’re around Baltimore, or more specifically Finksburg, MD, [Jason] could use a few hands to clear out this archive on Monday.

Hacking A NRF24L01 Radio For Longer Range

August 15, 2015 by 17 Comments

[RonM9] wasn’t happy with his 50 foot range on his NRF24L01 project. The RF had to cut through four walls, but with the stock modules, the signal was petering out after two or three walls.  A reasonably simple external dipole antenna managed to increase the range enough to do the job.

[RonM9’s] instructions show where to cut away the existing PCB antenna and empirically tune the 24 gauge wire for best performance. He even includes an Arduino-based test rig so you can perform your own testing if you want.

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Skysphere

Living In A Sphere In The Sky

August 15, 2015 by 79 Comments

Wow. Looking to live off the grid in style? [Jono Williams] just finished off his rather ambitious Skysphere project.

Using industrial materials (is that highway lamp post tower?), [Jono] designed and built his ultimate apartment tower out in the country. Kind of looks like a futuristic outlook or security post — something straight out of that [Tom Cruise] flick, Oblivion.

The project has been in the works for years, and [Jono] estimates its taken about 3000 hours so far — not to mention $50,000 USD in building materials. It’s solar powered, Android controlled, has a fingerprint scanner at the door, an integrated beer fridge in the couch, RGB LED lighting, WiFi, a stargazing platform, a custom queen size bed, his own AI voice, wireless sound, and automated heat management!  Continue reading “Living In A Sphere In The Sky” →

Arduino Radar Watches You Breathe

August 15, 2015 by 14 Comments

We’ve all likely watched an episode of “Star Trek” and admired the level of integration on the sick bay diagnostic bed. With its suite of wireless sensors and flat panel display, even the 1960s imagining of the future blows away the decidedly wired experience of a modern-day ICU stay. But we may be getting closer to [Dr. McCoy]’s experience with this radar-based respiration detector.

[Øyvind]’s build, which takes the origin of the term “breadboard” to heart, is based on a not-inexpensive Xethru module, which appears to be purpose-built for detecting respiration. The extra-thick PC board seems to house the waveguides internally, which is a neat trick but might limit how the module can be deployed. The module requires both a USB interface and level shifter to interface the 2.8V levels of the module to the 5V Arduino Uno. In the video below, [Øyvind]’s prototype simply lights an RGB LED in response to the chest movement it detects, but there’s plenty of potential for development here. We’ve seen a laser-based baby breathing monitor before; perhaps this systems could be used to the same end without the risk of blinding your tyke. Or perhaps better diagnostics for sleep apnea patients than an intrusive night in a sleep study lab.

Clocking in at $249 for the sensor board and USB interface, this build is not exactly for the faint of heart or the light of wallet. But as an off-the-shelf solution to a specific need that also has a fair bit of hacking potential, it may be just the thing for someone. Of course if radar is your thing, you might rather go big and build something that can see through walls.

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