Author: Eliot

1332 Articles

Peltier Beverage Cooler

June 19, 2006 by 20 Comments

peltier beer cooler

Hacked Gadgets pointed out this great peltier based beverage cooler. It has a pulse width modulation based controller driving a 12V 80W peltier. Alan also pointed out Hack-A-Day reader Chris Garrison’s peltier beer cooler from last summer. The Defcon cooling contest from last year also featured a peltier based cooler.

[UPDATE: Afrotech’s Snapple Cooler or How to enhance your beverage with iron oxide. Thanks liam]

[UPDATE: PeltierBeer cooler first seen on Slashdot [thanks Wiki Multipla]. Mattt’s Peltier Beer Cooler on Bit-tech [thanks dougedey].

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Ridiculous Laser Wall Clock

June 18, 2006 by 19 Comments

servo controller

[nickjohnson] has produced an incredibly silly laser wall clock. It was built to test out his PWM servo controller board. He created a wall poster featuring numbers 0-9, hour, minute, AM, PM. The controller points at each symbol in sequence to spell out the time. It changes position every second which creates a nice ticking sound. The clock may be goofy, but you should have a look at his parallel port controller since it’s designed to be simple and uses common components.

DIY Optical Disc Duplicator

June 17, 2006 by 14 Comments

[matt] wrote me a couple weeks ago wondering how to build a robotic arm that can load and load/unload a CD or DVD from a drive. I told him about one built out of wood that I couldn’t find the link for. Matt wrote back to say he had found the Home built CD changer contraption. The design is pretty simple and uses gravity for downward movement, so you don’t have to worry about a motor slamming the head into the desk.

He also pointed out the one built by Ben out of Legos. He used it to rip his collection of CDs for his Squeezebox. You’ll remember his caller ID project from last week.

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WiGLE Data On Google Earth

June 16, 2006 by 6 Comments

wigle google earth

WiGLE is a massive user contributed database of WiFi access points and GPS coordinates. IronGeek decided to take that data and parse it into a KML file that Google Earth can understand. It uses cached data from WiGLE’s Java interface, JiGLE. Reader [bird603568] has been playing around with the script so that it will indicate the quality of service in addition to IronGeek’s showing whether or not WEP is being used. Visit his site if your interested the QOS feature.

[UPDATE: corrected based on bird603568’s comments]

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USB Drive Hacking

June 14, 2006 by 52 Comments

flash drive

[wesley mcgrew] has been playing around with Sandisk’s U3 Smart USB Drives technology. U3 is designed to make implementation of portable applications easier. The USB drive appears as a  CDROM drive and can autorun applications. Wesley has a guide for how to patch in your own CD ISO. This ties in pretty well with the dangers of USB drives that we’ve covered before (one, two) and Schneier has a recent post on USB security issues as well.

[UPDATE: [matt] pointed out a recent Security Catalyst podcast with Abe Usher on podslurping]

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DTMF Detector For Home Automation

June 13, 2006 by 27 Comments

dtmf detector

Scienceprog has posted how-to build a DTMF tone detector. DTMF are the standard sounds used in tone dialing. Plugging this circuit into your phone line you can decode the all the tones on the line back into their original number form. This would be useful for issuing commands to a home automation system or any other device that you wanted dial-in access to.

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