From Vacuum Cleaner Hacking To Weather Station Reverse Engineering

February 11, 2014 by 19 Comments

spectrum

[Spock] wanted to do a little reverse engineering of his Miele brand remote control vacuum cleaner, so he broke out his DVB-T SDR dongle to use as a spectrum analyser. Sure enough, he found a 433.83Mhz signal that his vacuum cleaner remote control was using, but to his surprise, he found a stray QAM256 signal when he expected an ASK  only one.

After a little detective work, [Spock] eventually tracked it down to a cheap weather station he had forgotten about. The protocol for the weather station was too compelling for him to go back to his vacuum cleaner, though. After downloading an rc-switch Arduino library and making a quick stop at his local radio shack to get a 433.92 radio receiver to decode the signal, he reverse engineered the weather station so he could digitally record the temperature output. The Arduino rc-switch library proved unable to decode the signal, but some Python work helped him get to the bottom of it.

With software defined radio becoming more accessible and common place, hacks like these are a nice reminder just how wired our houses are becoming.

Super Mario Lamp Encourages Physical Activity

February 11, 2014 by 13 Comments

FALTIN1HRBE3Z2Y.MEDIUM

What better way to encourage jumping around in the house than by adding your own Super Mario style question block lamps?

It’s a fun and easy project to do because it makes use of an IKEA Sangen lamp — it just needs some slight modifications and a bit of art work to turn it into this iconic question block. You will be working with mains voltage though, so please be careful!

The lamp itself is made out of fabric which means it can be taken apart easily, and then dyed that classic orange hue. Using a stencil you can spray paint on the question mark and then it’s just a matter of adding a springy-latching-pressure-switch (that’s the technical term for them right?) in line with the light bulb. Results may vary, but [Anred] has a great guide on how to make it to get you started.

Now all that’s missing is a sound effect to go with the switch!

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TARDIS Alarm Doesn’t Go VWORRRRRP VWRORRRP VWORRRP

February 11, 2014 by 11 Comments

tardis alarm

Motion sensors are pretty useful — but they’re just so darn ugly! Well — if you’re a Whovian — maybe this hack is for you. A 3D printed TARDIS Motion Sensor Alarm!

[Malcolm] has a home security system that uses a series of motion sensors to detect movement in the house. When movement is detected an indicator LED turns on, and a wireless signal is sent to the main control system. So after discovering a nice 3D model of the TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension in Space) on Thingiverse, he decided to see if he could hack one of his motion sensors to fit inside of it instead.

As it turns out, it was as simple as removing the sensor’s external shell, 3D printing a few support pieces inside of the TARDIS, and soldering on a bright blue LED to replace the dinky indicator light. Simple, but effective!

Don’t forget to check out the following video. Allons-y!

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Introducing The SquareWear Mini, With Its Chainable Color LED Matrix

February 10, 2014 by 8 Comments

[Ray] just tipped us about his latest project: the SquareWear Mini, which basically is an improved version of the SquareWear 2.0 that we featured a month ago. For our readers that may have missed it, the SquareWear is essentially a wearable Arduino platform running at 3.3V and 12MHz. Both versions are based on an ATMega328 microcontroller running the V-USB library to provide USB connectivity, put together with diverse onboard peripherals.

As you can see in the picture above, the Mini includes 2 N-MOSFETs, one temperature sensor, one light sensor, a 16KB EEPROM memory, one buzzer, a one cell LiPo battery connector together with one charging controller, and finally a power switch (USB/battery). It is supposed to be 25% smaller than the SquareWear 2.0 and is optimized to work with a WS2812B-based 5×7 RGB LED matrix that [Ray] also designed. The latter can easily be cascaded in X/Y directions with other LED matrices in order to expand the overall display.

At last, [Ray] created a software to design animations and upload them to the SquareWear . A presentation video of the complete system is embedded after the break and you can download all the design files on GitHub.

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Cobalt RaQ Retrofit Help Geek Up Your Entertainment Center

February 10, 2014 by 20 Comments

cobalt-raq-jukebox

Even network engineers who toil away in hot server rooms (which aren’t actually all that hot because they’re well climate controlled) deserve nice things. That’s why Cobalt came out with these gorgeous front bezels for their rack mounted equipment… around twenty years ago. [Geekmansworld] is reviving the look, but he’s not hiding it away in a server rack. He scrapped the guts and used the front bezel and controls as part of his media server.

His first new addition to the case was a pair of hard drives which connect to an eSATA hub also stored in the enclosure. He buttoned it up and gave it a test run. Everything worked smoothly and he hopes that it will continue that way without overheating when the summer rolls around again.

Of course a dead front bezel is no fun so he cut off the portion of the original circuit board which hosts the buttons seen on the right. These buttons now connect to a U-HID board which turns the button presses into mouse or keyboard inputs using a USB connection. The original display was swapped out for a backlit character LCD. The LEDs to the left are a refit which turns the status indicators into a VU-Meter. See the entire thing at work after the break.

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Python With Braces

February 10, 2014 by 110 Comments

python

If there’s one thing about Python that’s slightly disconcerting, it’s the complete lack of braces, or as they’re called in American English, suspenders. A feature of every variety of C, Java, PHP, Perl, and a whole bunch of other very powerful languages, braces make things more legible and don’t rely on precise indentation. [Ruby] and [Eran] have come up with a way to use these punctuation marks with Python in a project they call Python with Braces.

As its name implies, Python with Braces doesn’t care about indentation: you’re free to make you code extremely ugly, or write your code properly in K&R style. Each line is terminated in a semicolon, and blocks of code with only one statement don’t require curly braces, just like C and Java.

Right now [Ruby] and [Eran] have a Windows installer with an OS X package on its way. Executing a Python with Braces script only requires executing it with a ‘pythonb’ executable instead of the normal ‘python’ executable.

Java Grinder Spits Out DsPIC And MSP430 Assembly Code

February 10, 2014 by 13 Comments

java-code-grinder

[Michael Kohn] sent in a link to the set of projects he’s been working on lately. The Java Grinder is a project that converts Java code for use on microcontrollers. This actually started back in 2009, when he mentioned that the project was worthless because there were already a ton of Java virtual machines out there. But if he had really thought that he’d never learn anything. We’re glad [Michael] picked this back up and made something out of it.

The image above shows the proof of concept. It’s a box bouncing around the Nokia 6100 screen. He wrote the animation in Java, and used his grinder to turn the code into dsPIC assembly, which was then compiled and flashed onto the microcontroller. That’s not all, he’s also coded a Mandelbrot set generator or the same hardware. As it stands he can also produce assembly code for use on MSP430 chips.

This kind of exploration is great for the brain. We see it as a natural extension of the learning you acquire from Nand2Tetris which walks through the essential text The Elements of Computing Systems. If you’re not familiar, that’s a trip from building your first logic gate, which you plunk together with others to build an ALU, then start coding all the way up to a virtual machine to run on your simulated hardware.

Video of the bouncing box and Mandelbrot set is below.

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