A Magic Light Bulb For All Your Bright Ideas

June 13, 2017 by 2 Comments

[Uri Shaked]’s lamentation over the breaking of his smart bulb was brief as it was inspiring — now he had a perfectly valid excuse to hack it into a magic light bulb.

The first step was disassembling the bulb and converting it to run on a tiny, 130mAh battery. Inside the bulb’s base, the power supply board, Bluetooth and radio circuits, as well as the LED board didn’t leave much room, but he was able to fit in 3.3V and 12V step-up voltage regulators for the LiPo battery.

[Shaked]’s self-imposed bonus round was to also wedge a charging circuit — which he co-opted from a previous project — into the bulb instead of disassembling it every time it needed more juice. Re-soldering the parts together: easy.  Fitting everything inside a minuscule puzzle-box: hard. Kapton tape proved eminently helpful in preventing shorts in the confined space.

Continue reading “A Magic Light Bulb For All Your Bright Ideas” →

Ping Pong Ball Improves The Google Daydream Controller

February 11, 2017 by 1 Comment

[Matteo] has just released a new installment of his Google Daydream VR controller hack, which we first covered last year (when he got it working with iOS). This time around he’s managed to forge a half Daydream, half PlayStation Move controller hybrid.

The original controller only managed a mere 3 DOF (Degrees of Freedom) using the internal accelerometer; although this conveyed rotational motion around the 3 axis, transitional information was completely lacking. [Matteo] resolves this by forming a simple positional marker out of a white LED enclosed in a standard ping pong ball; He tracks this setup using an iSight camera.

To gel everything together, he adds motion tracking to his already extensively developed software stack, which enables him to unshackle the Daydream controller from Android. He deciphers the Bluetooth packets and streams the sensory information straight to a web browser over a webSocket connection.

sf-stack

The results are quite impressive and the tracking is smooth. Not only does this add to the final goal of hacking his way towards a platform independent VR motion controller, he aptly gets some inspiration from Sony, extends Google’s hardware and even manages to use Apple’s webcam along the way. How’s that for carving passages between the walled gardens of consumer electronics?

Continue reading “Ping Pong Ball Improves The Google Daydream Controller” →

Sticking With The Script For Cheap Plane Tickets

January 30, 2017 by 27 Comments

When [Zeke Gabrielse] needed to book a flight, the Internet hive-mind recommended that he look into traveling with Southwest airlines due to a drop in fares late Thursday nights. Not one to stay up all night refreshing the web page indefinitely, he opted to write a script to take care of the tedium for him.

Settling on Node.js as his web scraper of choice, numerous avenues of getting the flight pricing failed before he finally had to cobble together a script that would fill out and submit the search form for him. With the numbers coming in, [Grabrielse] set up a Twilio account to text him  once fares dropped below a certain price point — because, again, why not automate?

Continue reading “Sticking With The Script For Cheap Plane Tickets” →

Hacking Google Daydream To Work With IOS

December 20, 2016 by 11 Comments

The Google Daydream is a VR headset with a controller, and according to the folks at Google, “It’s not currently compatible with iOS and won’t be for several years probably.” OK.

This inspired [Matteo Pisani] to get to work on the protocol that it uses to speak with Android phones. Cutting to the chase, he got it working in several days.

There really wasn’t all that much to it. The controller sends data over Bluetooth, and [Matteo] noticed an “unknown” device on the network. Looking inside the data that it sent, it changed when he moved the controller. Not so unknown now! The rest of the work consisted of writing applications to test hypotheses, waving the controller around, and finding out if he was right. Read up if you’re interested in implementing this yourself.

We love protocol hacks here. From running quadcopters on your own remotes, to simply trying to turn on a lightbulb, it’s getting more and more important that we understand the various languages that our devices speak.

Think You Know C? Find Out

November 11, 2016 by 134 Comments

I’ve had the fortune or misfortune of interviewing a lot of job candidates over the years. It amazes me how often someone will claim to know something, sound reasonable, but then if you quiz them on it, it becomes really obvious that they don’t know much. To flush this out, we had a three-question test that would tell you a lot. People who got the right answer were ahead of the game, of course, but even looking at how people approached the answer (right or wrong) would tell you a lot, too.

I remember one case where the answer involved casting a value. A candidate had impressed me until faced with the question to which he said (more or less): “Well, there’s this function. I think it is called ‘cast’…” I think the look on my face told him that I actually knew the answer (not surprising, since I was giving the test) and that wasn’t it.

[Oleksandr Kaleniuk] has a C quiz of only five simple questions. They reminded me of at least one of my old company’s three-question quiz. I don’t want to say too much about the character of the test because I don’t want to give away the answers, but if you think you are a C wizard, go check it out. Then come back in the comments and tell us how you did. Just try to avoid posting spoilers (although you should probably avoid the comment section until you come back).

Continue reading “Think You Know C? Find Out” →