Replace Batteries With USB Power

August 19, 2010 by Mike Szczys 47 Comments

[Mark Bog] thought it was a waste to use batteries for his desktop touch pad. Quite frankly we agree that if you can avoid using disposable cells you should. He ditched the dual AA batteries inside of his Magic Trackpad and built a battery-sized adapter to feed it some juice. It consists of a dowel of similar diameter with a screw in each end. He scavenged a USB cord, connecting hot and ground wires to the corresponding pole of the adapter. Now his Trackpad is USB powered and never in need of a battery replacement or even a recharge.

We’re not familiar with the inner workings of Apple’s Magic Trackpad. We assume there’s a voltage regulator inside and we hope it doesn’t have a problem working with the 5V regulated power coming in from the adapter. If you’ve got the skinny on the hardware we’d love to hear about it in the comments. One last thing: because the forum linked above requires a login to view the images in the post, we’ve embedded the rest of them after the break for your convenience.

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Modchip Hacks PS3 Via USB Port

August 19, 2010 by Mike Szczys 74 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jOEbZEkp9A]

It’s been a long time coming, but the video above shows a modchip circumventing the PlayStation 3 security by running a game from a hard drive. The sites Ozmodchips.com which sells the modchip, and psx-scene.com which has confirmed them as working are both unstable right now due to heavy traffic. But here’s what we know. The device is called the PS Jailbreak and can be used to dump PS3 games to the hard drive of a PlayStation3 running the most current firmware (3.41). Dumped games can then be played from the hard drive by selecting them from a menu that the modchip spawns. It’ll cost you though. The current preorder price is $169.99 AUD or $147.47 US dollars with a projected delivery date of August 27th.

[Thanks Charlie via Slashdot]

7-segment Sudoku

August 19, 2010 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

[John Sarik] keeps cranking out new ideas for his digital Sudoku project. This time he’s using 7-segment displays for each digit. The game play works the same as the Nixie Tube version, but this makes things quite a bit easier to build. The board above is one of the nine modules that make up the game. They each use three shift registers to drive the nine 7-segment displays. With the help of five resistors all of the multiplexing is addressed via the serial input on those chips.

Make IPhone A Penetration Testing Tool

August 18, 2010 by Mike Szczys 27 Comments

[Nicholas Petty] has posted a guide to setting up your iPhone as a penetration tester. You already carry it around with you and, although not too beefy, it does have the hardware you need to get the job done. So if you’re not interested in building a drone or carrying around a boxy access point try this out. The first step is to jailbreak your device and setup OpenSSH so that you can tunnel in for the rest of the setup. From there the rest of the setup is just acquiring build tools and compiling pentesting programs like Aircrack-ng, Ettercap, Nikto2, and the Social Engineering Toolkit. You’ll be up to no good testing your wireless security in no time.

Drone Cracks WiFi From On High

August 18, 2010 by Mike Szczys 47 Comments

The WiFi Aerial Surveillance Platform, or WASP for short, is an autonomous drone aircraft that sniffs out WiFi networks. But it packs a much larger punch than that. Built into this US Army surplus target drone you’ll find an ITX form-factor computer with a Via C7 500 MHz processor that is running Backtrack 4, the popular penetration testing Linux suite. But what if you want to do some real heavy lifting that the onboard PC can’t handle quickly? They’ve thought of that too. There’s an integrated 3G modem which allows for control over the Internet and facilitates the outsourcing of load-intensive operations to the cloud. It’s not shooting fireworks from the wings, but this payload has the potential to cause way more trouble.

[Thanks Spore]

Building A Discrete Digital-analog-converter

August 17, 2010 by Mike Szczys 26 Comments

Want to take back control of how your digital audio files become sound? One thing you can do is to build your own digital to analog converter. This one is made from discrete components, centered around a resistive ladder. Yes, there are a couple of integrated circuits in there which are used for demultiplexing the incoming signal but the magic happens in that R-2R network. The project is an interesting read and makes a point of looking at the issues raised when trying to precision match resistors. Apparently it can be done with 0.1% components if you have a lot of them and a multimeter that can measure down to seven decimal places.

[Thanks Bigbob]

Negative Laser Etching

August 17, 2010 by Mike Szczys 23 Comments

[James] has been refining a method of negatively etching metal with a laser. He had been using a product called Thermark which is designed for this process, but it’s quite expensive. He found that paint designed for wood stoves works just as well. To prepare the surface he bead blasted it and then cleaned of the residue and finger prints off with acetone. The board was preheated in an oven before covering it with the spray paint. He ran the laser at 98/100 power and 90/400 speed at a step size of 0.1mm to achieve the results above. This should immediately make you think about making circuit boards. We’d love to ditch the toner transfer and we’re always looking for one more reason to get a laser cutter.