I was poking around spark fun electronics, and came across this interesting walk through showing spark fun’s solder stenciling technique. (I’d put on some gloves before handling that much lead paste) They top it off with some alternative ways of doing reflow work. My favorite has to be the target hotplate method. It’s a nice introduction if you’re interested in doing SMD work to save money and space on your projects [but not sanity. say goodbye to that] Me? I’ve used a 15 watt weller with a dremel modified small tip. It works great if you’ve got some one of those syringes of heat activated glue. Place, bake and solder.
Ion Cooler Take 2
[Jared] sent in inventgeek.com’s ion cooler 2.0. This time the ion cooler is pushing air out of the case to avoid charged air crossing the sensitive components. They kept the cost down and used easily acquired components.
Online Skill Crane
[Ethan] sent in the online skill crane. It made it to shmoocon, but now it’s online for anyone to play. The machine is interfaced to the parallel port and controlled with a C program. It lacks a bit on the tech details, but you know you want one. Playing nets you a video of the results linked via email.
Happy Halloween Extra
[Update: pumpkin carved by Team Hack-A-Day member mastershake916]
We’ve got plenty of tricks around here, and I’ve got a treat coming up – you’ll hear about it in the next podcast.
[Ronald Schaten] sent me his USB LED fader. ATMega, PWM lit LEDs, he uses it to indicate status on his pvr.
[computerguru365] sent in his cell phone car charger turned USB cable
[steve] sent in this over the top C64DTV mod.
[Everett] sent along his button activated PSP shoulder lighting.Nice tiny soldering work for that on.
[Jorge] sent in his friends latest junk art metal lathe. Not an easy thing to build – Nice!
[gijs] sent me this crazy bent Casio SK-1. We’ve had a few of these on Hackaday before.
[seniorcheez] sent in his iPod shuffle dock with integrated power and tunecast.
Thinkpad Style Keyboard Light
[Sprite_tm] keeps coming up with nice work. This time he sent in his thinkpad style keyboard LED lighting solution for his toughbook. I know, you’re thinking… ‘it’s a LED…’ He used an ATtiny13 to monitor the caps lock LED. If it’s operated two times in succession, the LED is turned on and off. Nice, clean and effective.
[By the way, Part 2 of my diy projector how-to is up on engadget. Look for part 3 later Tuesday.]
Dan Kaminsky’s SSL Hell
Here is another segment from Dan Kaminsky’s talk at Toorcon 8. You can download the high quality version here. He discovered approximately 1 in 3 deployed SSL boxes share a private key. This means that you can buy a box off of eBay and read encrypted SSL traffic from any identical box. He has also got a trick for making bank logins more secure.
Wireless Card = ARM Development Platform
[Archantos] sent us this one. The mustumbler project is actually trying to use some external hardware to make a miniature wireless stumbler. [Archantos] points out that it’s could be a cheap way to get your hands on an ARM development platform. He’s right. Just a few connections gets access to the I2C bus, a GPIO expander for I2C runs the LCD and an EEPROM is there for program storage. The software is still being sorted out, but the hardware itself is functional. If they can manage to reverse engineer the Conexant chipset, they should have a very promising platform.
