Egg Clock (it’s Egg-ceptional)

May 3, 2011 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

Easter is over and with some plastic eggs still on hand, [Franspaco] was looking for something to do with them. He decided to use an egg as an enclosure for a digital clock.

You can see that the finished project uses just one 7 segment LED display to show the time. A scrolling number method is used to delineate each digit of the 24-hour time readout. The display will go blank, followed by two numbers for the hours, a dash as a separator, and finally two more digits for the minutes. A PICAXE microcontroller drives the clock, but for accuracy a DS1307 does the timekeeping.

[Franspaco] etched his own circuit board that is sized to fit perfectly, housing the two chips, an LED, and a programming header. The on-board LED blinks at 1 Hz, giving some inner glow to the plastic shell. He accomplished most of his goals, but was unable to fit the batteries inside of one egg, prompting the need for a tethered power-egg. If he moves to surface mount components for the next generation of this device we think he’ll have no problem fitting a small battery (like an A23) inside.

HDD Unlocking On The Mitsubishi Multi-Communication System

April 29, 2011 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

It’s a few years old, but [Brian360’s] method of unlocking the hard drive on his Mitsubishi Multi-Communication System is quite interesting. Mitsubishi describes their MMCS as a human-vehicle communication tool. It’s basically an in-dash screen and controls to display navigation maps and play music. [Brian] found that the hard drive for the MMCS in his 2008 Lancer was locked, and could not be cloned and swapped out for a larger drive. Sound familiar to anyone? Hard drive locking has been used in many systems, including the original Xbox, which we’ll get back to in a minute.

The setup seen above was used to grab the hard drive password from the system itself. A custom adapter card was built and plugged in between the hard drive and the MMCS hardware, with test points for each of the data line. [Brian] attached a digital storage oscilloscope, and after a bit of poking around, found a way to trigger the scope when the password was requested. He explains the process of converting the captured data into an ASCII string password.

With that in hand how would you unlock the drive? The favorite tool for this is hdparm, a tool which was used with early Xbox unlocking but which is still in use with other hardware today. Now brian has a disk image backup and the ability to swap out for larger hardware.

[Thanks Traitorous8]

[Phillip Torrone] Pleads For Companies To Open Source Discontinued Projects

April 29, 2011 by Mike Szczys 48 Comments

[PT] just published an editorial calling on manufactures to transfer knowledge about products they are discontinuing by making them open source. He makes his case on the basis that millions of dollars and innumerable man hours go into developing these products, only to be lost when the company decides that the project is no longer (or maybe never was) profitable. We have to say he’s got a point. Granted the answer to “why not?” is that companies don’t want to give any help to their competitors. But just think of the opportunities lost to society when we can’t build on the work of others.

Now [Phillip] doesn’t stop with his plea for new policies. He goes on to list and defend a few products that are already dead and buried, for which he wishes the secrets had first been shared. These include the Palm V personal data assistant, IBM’s Deep Blue, Sony’s robotic toys/pets, and several others. For what it’s worth, we can think of one company that’s a shining example of this; the source code for Doom, which id Software released for non-profit use more than a decade ago. Good for you id!

ChronoTune: Listen To Radio By Year, Not By Frequency

April 29, 2011 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

The ChronoTune is a radio that plays sounds from different eras. This project was developed as an entry for the Redbull Creation Challenge by some members of i3Detroit, a hackerspace in the motor city. It allows a user to turn the dial to tune in a new moment in history, but they can also listen in on the present day. They’ll be greeted with the sounds of a tuning radio, followed by music or audio clips common to the period displayed on the dial.

As you know from the last contest entry, each project must use an Arduino to qualify. It reads a rotary encoder attached to one of the knobs on the front of the case. This doesn’t directly move the tuning needle. Instead, it’s attached to the guts of an inkjet printer to move it back and forth. This lets the radio tune itself if need be.

The audio is played from several sources. There is an MP3 module that allows for longer clips, but there are also some ISD voice recorder chip modules that play back shorter clips. If the dial is tuned to present day, an FM radio module tunes in a station over the air.

Having trouble reading that dial? Don’t worry, there’s a simulated Nixie tube display sticking out the top of the case to provide a digital readout of the currently selected time period. Check out the video after the break to see the team walk us through each part of the ChronoTune.

Continue reading “ChronoTune: Listen To Radio By Year, Not By Frequency” →

The Start To Finish Of An Interactive Exhibit

April 29, 2011 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

[Andrew & Deborah O’Malley] were tapped to created an interactive exhibit. The mission was to show that social problems take continual support from a lot of people before they can be solved. The piece needed to be architectural in nature, and they ended up building this touch-sensitive model building with individually lighted windows.

The project log that the [O’Malleys] posted shows a well executed battle plan. They used tools we’re all familiar with to achieve a highly polished and pleasing result. The planning stages involved a virtual mock-up using Google SketchUp. The details needed to order the shell from a fabricator were pulled from this early work, while the team set their sights on the electronics that shed light and that make the piece interactive. The former is provided by a Shiftbrite module for each window, the latter comes from the Capacitive Sensing Library for Arduino. Despite some difficulty in tuning the capacitive grid, and getting all of those Shiftbrites to talk to each other, the exhibit went swimmingly. It’s not hard to imagine how easy it is to start a conversation once attendees are attracted by the seductive powers of touch sensitive blinky lights.

The Concepts Behind Robotic Maze Solving

April 28, 2011 by Mike Szczys 14 Comments

[Patrick McCabe’s] latest offering is a well-built maze-solving bot. This take on the competitive past-time is a little more approachable for your common mortal than the micro-bot speed maze solving we’ve seen. Don’t miss seeing the methodical process play out in the clips below the fold.

The playing field that [Patrick’s] robot is navigating is made up of a electrical-tape track on a white background. The two-inch tall double-decker bot is every economical. It uses an RBBB Arduino board to read an optical reflectance sensor array made by Pololu, then it drives a couple of geared motors using an L293D h-bridge breakout board. But we already know that [Patrick’s] a talented robot builder, this time around we’re happy to see his in-depth discussion of how to program a robot to solve a maze. In it he covers all of the different situations your robot might face and how to deal with them. Once you’ve dug through all of the concepts, dust off that bot you’ve got lying in the corner and start writing some new firmware.

Continue reading “The Concepts Behind Robotic Maze Solving” →

Hacker Typer Lets You Turn Jibberish Into Useless Code

April 28, 2011 by Mike Szczys 35 Comments

We generated the screen full of code seen above literally by bashing a hand on the keyboard repeatedly like a monkey. You know, just like how hackers are portrayed in the movies? Hacker Typer makes you look like you know what you’re doing even though you’re too lazy to do something real. It’s a pointless website that’s none-the-less worth a few moments of your time just for the sake of amusement. You’ll be greeted with a set of options. The first lets you decide what pre-determined text will appear as you type. The rest are for page title, foreground and background colors, and number of characters that will appear with each keystroke.

The default features start off with three characters generated for each keystroke, another annoying staple of Hollywood film making. Oh well, even movies that try really hard to get things right end up getting under the skin of someone. Case in point, the Linux shell readout from Tron Legacy.

[via The Presurfer]