Reverse Engineering USB Drivers

August 20, 2009 by 17 Comments

luxeed_keyboard

When [Jespersaur] purchased a Luxeed LED keyboard, he was disappointed to find that the drivers were not open source and didn’t support all the features he wanted. His solution? Hack the drivers that come with it, and implement his own. In his article, he gives a basic rundown of beginning reverse engineering by multiple methods and a brief introduction to libusb. For the Linux drivers, check out [Kurt Stephens]’s site, where he supplies a link to the source code, instructions on building it, and a tutorial on sending commands to the keyboard.

Modular Computing

August 20, 2009 by 20 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBFoFYhC9B4]

This is the Illuminato X Machina, a “cellular” style computing system.  Each unit is a fully functioning computer with its own processor, storage and communications.  You can watch above as a change in the operating software is propagated across the grid. You can see the LEDs in the video going nuts, there are actually LEDs on the sides too. [Justin] described it to us as a personal fireworks show on your desk.  This system is fully open with the schematics and source code available on their site. You might recognize these guys too, we covered their Open Source GameBoy.

Condom Testing Robot

August 20, 2009 by 37 Comments

coital-model

Broken condoms are a serious concern, not only for those who break them, but the companies who manufacture them. When studying the common reasons for breakage, a coital robot was used to simulate usage. Though it isn’t much of a robot, consisting mainly of simple pneumatics, it does serve its purpose. The study was able to determine the most common cause of breakage, and hopefully this information will lead to less occurrences. Robots do exist in the sex industry, and not just in that speculative future sex bot sense. Why weren’t any bots of a sexual background included in the big picture? The comments might want to stray towards future tech and possibilities, but we’re curious what there is out there currently and how robots are helping the industry.

E-bike Across Canada For $10

August 19, 2009 by 29 Comments

Justin Lemire-Elmore E-bike

[Justin Lemire-Elmore] spent one month riding his electric bike across Canada last summer. He made the journey from Vancouver to Halifax in 30 days using a mere $10 worth of electricity to recharge his bike. He put together a rather bizarre looking semi-recumbent bicycle to hold all of his gear. The motor controller, charge controller, battery packs, and lighting system were all his own design. He has a captivating 2 hour presentation embedded below in which he describes all the problems he had with his equipment during the trip as well as all the great experiences the journey offered. Continue reading “E-bike Across Canada For $10” →

Etch Aluminum Control Panels

August 19, 2009 by 11 Comments

This clever Instructable demonstrates how to etch beautiful aluminum control panels for electronics projects. We like how similar this process is to DIY circuit board etching. Both abide by the same technique and use blue transfer paper. The primary difference is in the use of muriatic acid and hydrogen peroxide for etching aluminum.

Xbox Crammed Into Inch-thick Package

August 19, 2009 by 24 Comments

Xbox Micro

Reminiscent of [Ben Heck]’s portable and laptop console mods, [Bandit5317] over at Xbox-Scene managed to fit the guts of an original Xbox into a custom-built slim case that measures just 2.5 centimeters thick. In his post, he describes some of the difficulties of cutting down a behemoth Xbox to a third of its original size, such as rewiring a custom IDE cable to avoid the extra 1/16-inch it would take to fold a standard one. The case is hand-crafted, (no laser cutter!) no-frills box made of painted polycarbonate, and man is it sexy. It is built off of a v1.4 motherboard running a third-party BIOS and with a 320GB laptop hard drive. Load up XBMC Media Center and you’ve got the slimmest home theater PC on the block.

[thanks FranklyCrafty]

Rename Files En Masse In Windows

August 19, 2009 by 55 Comments

Bulk Rename Utility

Everybody hates it when they have to rename a fileset to fit a new naming scheme. Instead of doing it the hard way and writing a one-time script to go through and rename everything, check out Bulk Rename Utility from [Jim Willsher]. It provides you with a multitude of methods to take care of business and allows you do pick your favorite method, be it regular expressions, simple finding and replacing, prefix/suffix modification, or a combination of many more.

However, if the sheer amount of options available overwhelms you or if you just want an easier way to do things, check out A.F.5 from [Alex Fauland]. A.F.5 offers features like adding a counter to your filenames, change file attributes, and save your rename settings out to a file for repeat use.