Author: Eliot

1332 Articles

Hack-A-Day Extra

November 23, 2005 by 22 Comments

xbox

Yes, I was able to get an Xbox 360 on launch day. No, it wasn’t actually hard for me to get one either so I’ll spare you my story. I’ll probably sell it for a Playstation 3 when that is released, but I felt it was necessary to buy one on the first day since I’ve been missing out on all of the PSP homebrew fun. I’ll be doing a separate Xbox 360 post (with crash pictures), but if you’ve got specific questions you’d like me to answer put them in the comments.

The Folding@HOME team is still plowing ahead. They recently completed 4 million points and will become a top 100 team in less than a week. Find out more at the team forum. If you are going to be back at your parents’ house for Thanksgiving, don’t forget to start their machine folding.

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Thermal Keypad Combo Snooping

November 23, 2005 by 32 Comments

thermal image

This is interesting demo of how residual heat in a safe keypad could expose the key sequence. Using a hand-held thermal imaging device (not cheap) you can read which buttons on a keypad were pressed 5 to 10 minutes after the event from up to 10 meters away. Even though each key press is momentary there is enough heat transfer to distinguish the button in a thermal image. The sequence can be determined since the first button pressed has the least heat. This method break s when buttons are reused in the sequence, but being able to see the unused keys cuts down the number of possible permutations.

[thanks Mr. Mistoffolees]

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Bluetooth Stereo Bridge

November 22, 2005 by 9 Comments

bluetooth mouse

[Chris] had made a sturdy mount in his car for his iPAQ. He uses the iPAQ for directions and playing mp3s. After nearly ripping apart his line-in cable every time he took the iPAQ out of its cradle he decided to create a wireless solution. He chopped up a pair of HP FA303A Bluetooth headphones to extract the receiver portion. The headphone’s band is prone to breaking so it might be possible to find a damaged pair for cheap. The receiver was placed into an old mouse. Once the buttons were hooked up to the mouse buttons and a voltage regulator added the unit was ready to start streaming audio directly to the stereo.

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Amstrad IPod Shuffle Tape Drive

November 21, 2005 by 28 Comments

amstrad

[sbeam] was really excited about his latest acquisition: an Amstrad CPC 464. This model has a tape deck instead of a floppy drive. sbeam had no way of transferring software on his computer to the Amstrad. He looked around and found the PlayTZX tool. PlayTZX reads a .tzx tape backup and generates a WAV file. sbeam dumped these conversions onto his iPod Shuffle and used a car cassette adapter to play them in the Amstrad’s deck. Nice new school solution for old hardware.

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Electrified Tankbag

November 20, 2005 by 21 Comments

tankbag

Once Scot got his second motorcycle it became very apparent that he needed to figure out a way to transfer his gadget gear between bikes. A simple trailer connector is used to provide 12V to the bag. This power is distributed by a block with three switches on it. One powers the map light. Another powers the radar detector. The third switch is for a future MP3 player. With some cable shortening Scot was able to get the radar detector and its display into the bag. Now by simply disconnecting the power lead he can move the whole bag to a different bike.

[thanks Sleekblack]

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Hacking An LCD

November 19, 2005 by 28 Comments

lcd

The HD4478 is an extremely common LCD controller. The folks at Sorgonet got this particular display out of an old credit card reader. It’s easy to talk to these controllers using just a parallel port cable. With the lcdmod project you can send text strings directly to the display from the command line. Sorgonet has a lot of related LCD links if you are interested in putting a display on your next project.

[thanks h-tech]

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Winamp Control With Serial Interface

November 18, 2005 by 20 Comments

winamp

Pasteler0 wanted to build an external control system for Winamp. Using the COM-port plugin he was able to wire up 4 control buttons directly to his serial port. The software also supports a 15 button mode. The switches are mounted in a clear plastic floppy disk box and connected to the computer serial port using CAT5. It’s a nice hardwired solution for control, but if you want just a simple remote, try WinLIRC.

[thanks geuis and ian]

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