Install OSX On The HP TouchSmart

November 6, 2008 by 8 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLoqu8G9oEo]

[Aaron Nelson] of Hijinks Inc. wrote up how he installed OSX on his HP TouchSmart IQ507. It looks and works like you would expect, save for a few things. The touchscreen works, but the calibration is so far off it’s useless. The most important things, like ethernet and the memory card reader, work fine. [Nelson]’s biggest frustration is that he has to disable the on board audio every time he logs in, so that the keyboard and mouse will be recognized. He is working on improvements, and would love to hear any suggestions you have.

Gyro Controlled Game

November 6, 2008 by 4 Comments

gyro_game

[Eric] sent in this cool project that he did as part of his graduation project. He built a game that uses a gyroscope as an input device. For the gyroscope, he’s using a Powerball with a sensor inserted into it. This data is gathered by an Arduino in a pretty enclosure. The whole unit connects to a PC via USB and is supposedly plug and play. There’s a video of the setup in action on the site, just try not to laugh too hard watching them.

Minimalist LED Light Detecting Candle

November 5, 2008 by 17 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPe5RtUOOdc]

Our flickering LED circuit combined two known circuit, and certainly wasn’t graceful because of it. [sprite_tm] saw quite a few areas where the circuit could be reduced. He ended up taking it down to just two LEDs, a battery, and an ATtiny13. The first step was getting rid of the current limiting resistors. The datasheet shows that with a 3V supply the AVR will limit the current well below the maximum current. The light sensor was removed next. [sprite_tm] referenced an earlier post on sensing with LEDs. He measures the voltage across one of the LEDs while it is off to see how much light is hitting it. The current draw while on is 10mA and 50uA while off.

Getting Root On The G1

November 5, 2008 by 27 Comments

If you’ve been holding off on a T-Mobile G1 purchase because you didn’t like the apparent user restrictions, there’s some good news. The Android powered phone comes with an easy button for getting root. Install a terminal app and you can manually start the telnetd service. All that’s left is telenetting into the device and it’ll give you root level access.

Arduino Wireless Rotating POV

November 5, 2008 by 4 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QMV4mRVpo4]

got an old cdrom and an Arduino laying around? Why not make it into a spinning POV display. It was built using parts from a floppy drive and a cdrom, as well as an Arduino and a small wireless transceiver. Using an IR sensor to detect rotations, the Arduino sends data to the LEDs. The wireless is used when sending new messages to the device. The link is in Spanish, so here’s the Google Translation.

[via Hacked Gadgets]

LCD That Scans Fingerprints

November 5, 2008 by 10 Comments

auo_uv

AU Optronics Corp has unveiled a new LCD panel that doubles as a fingerprint scanner. Each pixel is equipped with 4 optical sensors, so a 320×240 screen would have a scanning resolution of 640×480. They have also experimented with different sensors, such as UV. You can see an LCD panel that detects and displays the UV index above. Why did they use a secondary display to show the data though?

[via Gearlog]