Foul-mouthed Game Will Get You In Trouble

January 25, 2010 by 38 Comments

[Fridgehead] modified his Simon Says game to include a dirty word for each lighted button. This is a real good way to teach kids to swear and to get child protective services to pay you a visit all at the same time. The hardware has been modified to use an Arduino in tandem with an ISD audio chip. These chips can record and playback sound. Although [Fridgehead] could have made it say anything he, choose four words you won’t say in front of your mother. We should warn you not to play the video after the break if you’re at work or it’ll be your boss that comes after you, not your disappointed mom.

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Things That Kill You, Hacked For Clean Energy

January 25, 2010 by 26 Comments

Tobacco and E coli can wreak havoc on your body causing serious damage if not death. Some researchers from the University of California at Berkeley have found a way to take these potentially dangerous organisms and make them do our bidding. By genetically engineering a virus they have shown that the two can be used to grow solar cells. Well, they grow some of the important bits that go into solar cells, reducing the environmental impact of the manufacturing process.

Once a tobacco plant is infected with the altered virus it begins producing artificial chromophores that turn sunlight into electricity. Fully grown plants are ground up, suspending the chromophores in a liquid which is sprayed onto glass panels to create the solar cells. This types of creative solar energy production make us wonder if Thunderdome and the apocalypse are further off than we thought.

[Thanks Jon]

Android G1 Serial To Arduino

January 25, 2010 by 16 Comments

With the ability to get root access to some of these new powerful pieces of hardware we call cell phones, we’re a bit surprised we haven’t seen more interfacing with external hardware. Here’s an example of some rudimentary connections between an Android G1 and an Arduino. To do this, you must have your G1 rooted, have the Android SDK installed, and then a custom python program running.  There is also a simple level shifter from 3.3v to 5v necessary for the connection to the Arduino.  You can get all the details from the instructable. They’ve documented the process quite well adn we’re excited to see what kinds of stuff people come up with.

Face Tracking With X10

January 25, 2010 by 15 Comments

If you are looking to do some face tracking and don’t know where to start, this explanation of how to do it with X10 modules could be pretty helpful. Aside from having, what some could consider to be, the absolute most annoying website ever for a company, X10 also makes modular systems for home automation. X10 also refers to the industry standard for home automation, so sometimes just saying you did something with X10 can get confusing.   He is using the SDK to write custom code for the tracking, which you can download from the project page.

[via HackedGadgets]

Automated Super8 Film Scanning

January 25, 2010 by 27 Comments

For those of you who have been dreading the day that you have to dig out those old family films in Super 8 format and take them to get digitized, dread no more. Now you could turn it into a cool project. [Photobsen] has posted pictures of an automated system for scanning and compiling the film into a digital movie. There was already software available, called CineToVid, which would take the scanned segments and create a video from them, but doing the actual scanning was quite laborious. [Photobsen] built a quick automated system using an old floppy drive connected to his computer via parallel port. He now scans about 80 seconds of film per hour, unattended.

Rotary Encoding With Your Soundcard

January 25, 2010 by 14 Comments

[Stefan] sent in this project writeup to show us how he used a stepper motor as a rotary encoder. Using a stepper motor as an encoder isn’t really that new, as [Stefan] points out, we’ve seen it several times before. He wanted to use this in the quickest simplest way with his computer though. Instead of doing any decoding on a separate microprocessor, he’s connected the stepper directly to his sound card and written code to do the rest. You can download that code and see a video of some practical applications on his site.

PS3 Hacked!

January 24, 2010 by 72 Comments

There is very little information out at the moment, but [geohot] has successfully hacked the PS3 to have full read and write access, bypassing the Hypervisor. At the moment he’s not revealing the exploit, but with this knowledge it wont be long before the PS3 finally gets whats coming. Keep track of [geohot’s] progress on his twitter, @geohot, and blog.

[Thanks Jack, Julio, Jeremy, Squisso, and Vor]