Author: Will O'Brien

805 Articles

The Trackable Last HOPE Conference Badge

July 18, 2008 by 6 Comments


While Defcon badges have taken on the habit of being hackable electronics, The Last Hope badge is taking a new shape this year. It’s dubbed the Attendee Meta-Data project (AMD for short). Aside from the tombstonian dimensions, it features a trackable RFID tag that’s going to be used to create a different sort of conference experience.

Sure, the creators might use the badges to make sure they meet all the lovely ladies in attendance, but the idea is to use the data to improve the conference experience for everyone. Attendees have the ability to add tags indicating their interests. Combine that data with actual location tracking and people can now network and interact based on what and who they’re looking for. It’s social networking coming full circle to include actual socializing.

Cheap ARM Color LCD Platform

July 18, 2008 by 6 Comments


Today, [sprite_tm] let us in on one of his pet projects. This is an inexpensive portable game platform runs about $50 and happens to use an ARM CPU and a 320×240 color LCD. Because it’s so cheap, he’s been working on reverse engineering the thing and there’s already a proof of concept homebrew version of Pong out for it.
Update: Yeah, yeah – title’s fixed.

XBox Controller USB Labotomy

July 17, 2008 by 10 Comments


[sprite_tm]’s back with one of his excellent Atmel projects. This time he decided to turn an original XBox controller (cause he likes ’em) into a standard USB HID device. He gutted the custom USB chip that Microsoft installed and replaced it with an Atmel ATMega88. The ATMega required a few changes to the board, but nothing too off the wall.

NYC Soldering Championships

July 16, 2008 by 13 Comments


[Matt] let us know about the New York City Soldering Championships. They’ll be happening during the Ignite talks on July 29th at 7pm. 25 people will race head to head to assemble a fully functional electronics kit. Participants have to register in advance and are encouraged to bring their own iron. The kit hasn’t been chosen yet so people can’t practice. We hope they at least consider using a few SMD parts just to keep things interesting. Shout out if you’re planning to attend or compete!

[photo: Nick Bilton]

Turn Any Motor Into A Servo With RepRaps New Board

July 16, 2008 by 20 Comments


[Zach] just let us know about a new board that’s available from the RepRap project. It uses an AS5040 magnetic rotary encoder to measure the absolute position of the rotor of whatever motor you’re using. This is actually pretty damn exciting. Powerful servo motors are expensive, but with one of these, you can use whatever motor you can get your hands on. Big DC motors are cheap, but even used DC servo motors expensive. Best of all, the encoder is open source and you can score a kit version for a paltry $20. Now we can make that 8 horse power servo…