Optimus Prime Keeps A Vigilant Watch Over The Hen-house

October 30, 2012 by 13 Comments

[shOOter—]  and his family are just starting to keep chickens and need a coop in which the hens could roost. He wanted it to be mobile and protective and what is more mobile and protective and the leader of the Transformers? As you can see, his chicken coop is modeled after Optimus Prime.

The cab of the truck serves as the hen-house. It’s made of marine grade plywood held together with glue and galvanized nails. The exhaust stacks, which are made of PVC pipe, are not just decorative. They are chutes for the feed trays to either side of the blue ramp (you can’t really see the trays in this image). To give the chickens a way to stretch their legs he brought his welding skills to bear. The trailer portion of the build is a welded metal frame covered in mesh which provides a rather large exercise yard. Since the habitat is enclosed there’s really no need for an intricate motorized door.

[Thanks James]

Bluetooth Control For Your DSLR Or Just About Any Other IR Operated Device

October 30, 2012 by 8 Comments

Just the other day we were reading a Reddit thread asking about how to control a television with a smartphone. The conversation started by talking about adding an IR LED to the phone.  Then it was suggested that there should be standalone Bluetooth devices that convert commands to IR, and came around to the ideas that TV’s should ship with native Bluetooth hardware. We couldn’t agree more but we’re also not about to replace our TV just for this option. That’s why we were delighted to find this project waiting on our tip line. It’s a method of controlling a camera shutter from a smartphone using Bluetooth. But the technique will work for any device which uses an infrared remote control.

The video after the break shows two different devices controlling the camera shutter. As you can see in the diagram above, the iPhone is the master controller, connecting to a Bluetooth headset mounted on the camera. That headset was altered to feed the speaker connections into an IR LED pointed at the camera’s receiver. The iPhone plays an encoded audio track matching the IR remote command, resulting in the properly formatted message flashing on the LED. The watch doesn’t have the ability to playback audio, but it can send a message to the phone, which then plays the proper audio track through the headset.

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Extracting Data With Keyboard Emulation

October 30, 2012 by 58 Comments

A common challenge for computer security specialists is getting data out of a very locked-down system. Of course all network traffic on these test machines is monitored, and burning a CD or writing to a USB Flash drive is out of the question. Where there’s a will there’s a way, so [András] figured out how to extract data from a computer by emulating a keyboard.

Emulating a USB HID device is nothing new; the newest Arduino can do it, as can any AVR with the help of V-USB. [András]’s build emulates a USB keyboard that can download data from a computer by listening to the NUM, CAPS and SCROLL lock LEDs.

Of course, [András] first needs an app to transmit data through these keyboard status LEDs. To do this, his build carries with it a Windows executable file on the AVR’s Flash memory. After plugging his device into the computer, it writes this program to disk and is then able to send data out through keyboard status LEDs.

It’s not very fast – just over one byte per second – but [András] did manage to extract data from a computer, circumventing just about every anti-leaking solution.

Tablet Interacts With Magnets, How Does That Work?

October 30, 2012 by 24 Comments

Making computers interact with physical objects is a favorite of the HCI gurus out there, but these builds usually take the form of image recognition of barcodes or colors. Of course there are new near field communication builds coming down the pipe, but [Andrea Bianchi] has figured out an easier way to provide a physical bridge between computer and user. He’s using magnets to interact with a tablet, and his idea opens up a lot of ideas for future tangible interfaces.

Many tablets currently on the market have a very high-resolution, low latency magnetometer meant for geomagnetic field detection. Yes, it’s basically a compass but Android allows for the detection of magnets, and conveniently provides the orientation and magnitude of magnets around a tablet.

[Andrea] came up with a few different interfaces using magnets. The first is just a magnets of varying strengths embedded into some polymer clay. When these colorful magnetic cubes are placed on the tablet, [Andrea]’s app is able to differentiate between small, medium, and large magnets.

There are a few more things [Andrea]’s app can do; by placing two magnets on an ‘arrow’ token, the app can detect the direction in which the arrow is pointing. It’s a very cool project that borders on genius with its simplicity.

You can check out [Andrea]’s demo video after the break.

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Myst Book Plays Myst, Doesn’t Transport You To Other Ages

October 30, 2012 by 58 Comments

We shouldn’t have to remind you, but back in the early 90s one of the most popular computer games was Myst. Despite having the gameplay of a PowerPoint presentation, Myst went on to become one of the best-selling video games of all time and the killer app that made a CD-ROM drive a necessity rather than a luxury. [riumplus] loves Myst, and after 6 long years he’s finally completed his homage to his favorite game. It’s a replica of the in-game Myst book that is able to play every game in the Myst-iverse.

The build started off by searching for the same book used as a model for the book object in Myst. It’s a 135-year-old edition of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Volume LIV, Issue 312 from 1877. In keeping with the in-game assets, [riumplus] made dies for the spine and cover, embossed the word ‘MYST’ on the book, and filled these letters with 24-carat gold paint.

Inside the newly hollowed-out book [rium] added a very small x86 motherboard running Windows XP on a 32 Gig Compact Flash card. This tiny computer is able to run every Myst game ever made on a very nice touchscreen display.

It’s a work of art in our humble opinion, and a fitting tribute to the last great hurrah of the adventure game genre. After the break you can see [rium] interacting with his book, or just check out the build pics on [rium]’s Google+ page.

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Guide To Developing With The Stellaris Launchpad On A Linux Box

October 29, 2012 by 42 Comments

So you picked up your very own Stellaris Launchpad, a TI ARM dev board which can be in your hands for just five bones. They do distribute several free IDEs which are not size-limited but perhaps you’re more of a text editor and command line sort of person. Well you’re in luck. There’s now a guide to show you how to code for and program the Stellaris Launchpad from a Linux box with using one of the IDEs.

There are two main things that are needed to accomplish this. The first is a cross-compiling toolchain for the ARM architecture; something that has been readily available for quite some time. The second is a way to talk to the in-built Stellaris programmer from a Linux machine. The hardware uses the ICDI protocol, and as we reported last week the lm4tools project can be used for this purpose. The guide also covers building the StellarisWare package. It’s not a requirement, but it makes using the peripherals much easier and provides names for the I/O pins, etc.

Our favorite for debugging microcontroller projects is OpenOCD. From this thread post it looks like there is now ICDI support in the development branch of the software if you don’t mind compiling from source.

Pumpkin Tetris Inspired By Our Own LED Jack-o-lantern

October 29, 2012 by 12 Comments

The kids (or maybe their parents) are going to be lined up at [Nathan’s] front porch to get their turn at playing pumpkin Tetris. That’s right, he built a game of Tetris into a real pumpkin. We thought this looked quite familiar when we first saw it and indeed he was inspired by our own LED Matrix Pumpkin from two Halloweens ago. We love seeing derivative works and [Nathan] definitely make few great improvements to the process.

The matrix itself was wired in very much the same way we used, but he added an additional 58 LEDs to nearly double the size of the display. He used a paper grid and power drill to make room for the holes, but improved the visibility of the lights by sculpting square pixels in the skin of the fruit. But how does one control the game? The stem of the pumpkin is actually a joystick. One of the most innovative parts of the physical build was to use drywall anchors on the inside to mount the joystick hardware.

Don’t miss a demo video after the jump.

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