IM-ME Screen Reverse Engineered

February 1, 2010 by Mike Szczys 3 Comments

[Dave] figured out the command set for the IM-ME terminal. It took a bit of sleuthing to get this pink plastic peripheral to give up these secrets. He used an oscilloscope to sniff out the SPI connections, then used a hacked IM-ME to capture the traffic from a factory-fresh unit. He managed to extrapolate how write data was being sent but he still couldn’t figure out how commands were differentiated from that data. With the info at hand he searched around the interwebs to find that the screen uses an ST7565S controller. Now he’s got custom firmware to make the LCD display do his bidding and we’re wondering what’s next?

Wii Motion Plus Direct PC Interface

February 1, 2010 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

You can pick up a Wii Motion Plus module for under $20 and that’s not bad for an I2C gyroscope. This hack taps into the device through a PC parallel port. The connection calls for some level conversion to step down to the 3.3v needed by the module. The communication protocol borrows from the Wii on Arduino code examples that we saw last year. You can see the Wii Motion Plus controlling a virtual cube in the video after the break.

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120v Switching

January 31, 2010 by Mike Szczys 52 Comments

[Kenneth] built a 5v controlled power outlet inside of a junction box. We’ve seen plenty of projects that can switch 120v outlets using 5v logic for refrigerator controllers, lighting controllers, or grow systems, but they almost always use solid state relays to facilitate the switching. This iteration uses mechanical relays along with the necessary protection circuitry. The project is housed in an extra deep single-gang box and allows for individual switching of the two outlets. You can see this connected to an Arduino switching two lamps after the break.

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Recycled Cat Feeder

January 31, 2010 by Mike Szczys 25 Comments

I find that I do a lot of fun projects but I’m very bad about documenting them when I’m done. Holidays are for hacking (in my mind) so I usually plan ahead and do something cool during my time off. This project, which I loving call the Autodine-2009, was a spontaneous event over Thanksgiving that I’m just getting around to writing about.

Our cat’s want to be fed at 6am and are very insistent about it. Like most folks, I’d rather be sleeping at that time of day so I built an automatic cat feeder. Now we sleep while the cats eat. We don’t want to rely on a hack to feed our cats when we’re away so I didn’t go the route of an Internet-enabled multiple-dose feeder. Instead, I used parts on hand to create a single-serving dispenser on a timer. A servo rotates a false bottom to gravity-feed the cat food. The servo doesn’t have control circuitry so it is controlled through an h-bridge (I did have to buy 2 transistors for that) by an AVR ATmega8 microcontroller. There are two salvaged tactile switches to set the time and timer, and a serial LCD display that I’ve had sitting around for years. Power comes from an old cell phone charger a friend had just given me that spawned the feeder idea when I asked myself “hmmm, what can I use this for”?

I’ll demonstrate this recycled device for you in a video after the break. This wasn’t as hardcore as my AVR Tetris build but I’m much happier now that I can sleep in a bit.

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Add A Bluetooth Terminal To Your Kindle

January 31, 2010 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

This is an Amazon Kindle DX with a Sparkfun Bluetooth Mate stuck in it. [Darron] hacked the two together in order to have a wireless serial terminal on the device. There are three big pads in the middle of the Kindle PCB labelled GND, RX and TX, making it easy to figure out those connections. Getting voltage was a bit more difficult. He managed to find 4V coming off of one side of the Kindle’s wakeup switch which works well because the Bluetooth Mate has a voltage regulator on board. To protect the Bluetooth module he modified it to pull-up the TX from the on-board regulated 3.3V rather than the 4V coming in from the Kindle.

He’s also been doing some software work on the device now that he has easy access to it. Along the lines of the Ubuntu-on-Kindle hack from September, he’s compiled QT for the Kindle and written a couple of programs such as Sudoku to show that it works.

Hackaday Links: January 31st, 2010

January 31, 2010 by Mike Szczys 14 Comments

Marble Junker

Here’s a quick and dirty kinetic sculpture. It’s a track for a steel marble to roll around in with a magnet on a rotating wheel to pick it up and start it over again. Not every hack has to be a beautiful masterpiece, they just need to be fun. Of course, if this were an incredibly complicated piece it probably wouldn’t have ended up in a links post.

Eight-eyed Computer

[AlexP] has been involved in the NUI Group and in writing drivers for the PS3 Eye. This time around he’s got eight of them running on one computer at 60fps. Security cameras come to mind but this could be useful in a lot of projects. We’d be interested in seeing what you come up with. [Thanks Kyle]

Urine-gone

If you have a problem with folks peeing on your stoop then this is the answer. [Hannes Nehls] put together a urinating-drunkard deterrent by placing a humidity sensor in the (achem…) trouble-spot and a small tube above. When they pee on the sensor, it pees right back on them. Video available if you click through to the link.

Amplifier Tutorial

If you’re a little shaky when it comes to understanding and working with amplifiers this tutorial is for you. It’ll walk you through the basic concepts, then apply that knowledge in a simple op-amplifier circuit.

Severed Heads

It’s always nice to end a links post with something creepy. These faces are made from a cast of the artist’s face. They sing a trio of nonsense and it’s the life-like movements combined with the obviously mechanical backend that tingles our spine. But they’re really just a novelty and not the real thing. [Thanks Browneyedalbino][via Powered by Nerd]

The UltimateSIMON

January 30, 2010 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

[Simon Inns] designed a circuit board to retrofit an original Simon electronic game. This hack is immediately a win because he made sure that his design required no modification of the original case. The new PCB has many improvements. It moves the device from using 2 D-cells over to a 9 volt battery, the incandescent bulbs were out swapped out for three LEDs per button, and the use of tactile switches makes the buttons a lot more responsive (but does require a bit of modification to the colored button covers). Under the hood there’s a PIC18F2550 controlling a serial LED chip and handling input monitoring and sound generation. The video after the break is safe to watch at work, there’s no swearing involved this time. Continue reading “The UltimateSIMON” →