NFC Ring Unlocks Your Phone

March 17, 2014 by Eric Evenchick 31 Comments

This little ring packs the guts of an NFC keyfob, allowing [Joe] to unlock his phone with a touch of his finger.

The NFC Ring was inspired by a Kickstarter project for a similar device. [Joe] backed that project, but then decided to build his own version. He took apart an NFC keyfob and desoldered the coil used for communication and power. Next, he wrapped a new coil around a tube that was matched to his ring size. With this assembly completed, epoxy was used to cast the ring shape.

After cutting the ring to size, and quite a bit of polishing, [Joe] ended up with a geeky piece of jewelry that’s actually functional. To take care of NFC unlocking, he installed NFC LockScreenOff. It uses Xposed, so a rooted Android device is required.

We’ll have to wait to see how [Joe]’s homemade solution compares to his Kickstarter ring. Until then, you can watch a quick video of unlocking a phone with the ring after the break.

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A Cocktail Shaker With Android And Arduino

March 8, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 1 Comment

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The most rewarding part of any project must be sitting down to see the fruits of your labors set in action for the first time and relaxing with a nice drink. [Tony DiCola] is really showing off his ability to think ahead, because his smart cocktail shaker takes care of the post-build celebration, measuring out drinks with exacting precision.

The build measures out precise amounts of any liquid with the help of a small electronic scale [Tony] picked up from Harbor Freight. Instead of trying to interface with the electronics in the scale, he instead connected a INA125 instrument amplifier to the load cell. An Arduino micro measures the weight on the load cell, and with the known densities of gin, vermouth, and Kahlua, [Tony] can get a very good idea of how much liquid is in the cocktail shaker.

The really neat part of this build is the interface: [Tony] wrote an Android app for his tablet that talks to the Arduino with an Adafruit Bluefruit Bluetooth adapter. The app receives the current weight on the load cell, displays the current amount of liquor in the cocktail shaker, and provides step-by-step instructions for making any cocktail.

It’s a handy little device to keep around the liquor cabinet, and with an absurd amount of pumps and valves could easily become the basis for a very cool cocktail bot.

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EmuDroid 4: Completed!

March 8, 2014 by James Hobson 13 Comments

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[Tony Huang] is checking in with his EmuDroid 4 gaming controller. After tons of redesigns — it is now finished!

We first started following this project back in November, when it was in an early prototype stage. What he has done is crammed a 4″ Android tablet, the guts of a USB SNES controller, a USB OTG adapter and inductive charging unit into a custom designed 3D printed housing.

What we really like about this project is the level of documentation [Tony] has gone into during his many… many… many iterations of the 3D printed housing. For those of you who aren’t engineers or designers, it’s a great insight into what goes into prototyping a product before release. Now just imagine what it was like when we didn’t have 3D printers! Continue reading “EmuDroid 4: Completed!” →

The Flaming Yinlips

March 6, 2014 by Adam Fabio 11 Comments

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No, that’s not a Playstation Vita up there, it’s a “Yinlips YDPG18A” portable game system. [Ian] found that his Yinlips was lacking in the flash memory department, so he fired up his soldering iron. The Yinlips is based on an Allwinner Sunxi series processor, and uses a standard TSOP48 footprint flash. There is some standardization in flash pin out and packages, so [Ian] picked up the largest pin compatible chips he could find – a pair of 256 gigabit (32 gigabyte) chips from Micron. Desoldering the existing flash proved to be a bit of an adventure as the flash was glued down. [Ian] also didn’t have his hot air gun handy, making things even more interesting. Careful work with a razor blade broke the glue bond.

It turns out that the soldering was the easy part. All flash chips have geometry, die count, page size, block count, sector size, etc. The geometry is similar to the geometry in a hard drive. In fact, just like in modern hard drives, a system will read some basic information before accessing the full storage array. In the case of NAND flash, the processor can access the first page of memory, and query the flash for its part number. Once the part number is known, the geometry can be determined via a lookup table. [Ian] checked the NAND table on github, so he knew going in that his flash chips were not supported. Due to the complexities of booting Allwinner processors into Linux or Android, the table and the NAND driver that uses it exist in several places. The bootloader’s axf file, U-Boot, and several flash application binaries sent from the PC based LiveSuit flash app all required modification. Most of these files were packed into a single flash image. [Ian] used imgrepacker to unpack the image, then opened the hex files. The fact that he knew what the original flash parameter tables looked like was key. He searched for an existing Micron flash table entry, and replaced the parameters with those of his new chips.

With all the files modified, [Ian] re-packed his flash image and sent it over. The Yinlips rewarded his hard work by continually resetting in a bootloop. [Ian] wasn’t going to give up though. He wired into the boot console, and discovered that a CRC check failure on one of his modified files was causing the reset. He then disassembled binary issuing the reset. Changing the return value of the CRC to always pass fixed the issue. [Ian’s] now has a collagen infused Yinlips with 58GB of internal storage. Pretty good for a device that only started with 2GB.

Computers Playing Flappy Bird. Skynet Imminent. Humans Flapping Arms.

February 28, 2014 by Adam Fabio 18 Comments

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After viral popularity, developer rage quits, and crazy eBay auctions, the world at large is just about done with Flappy Bird. Here at Hackaday, we can’t let it go without showcasing two more hacks. The first is the one that we’ve all been waiting for: a robot that will play the damn game for us. Your eyes don’t deceive you in that title image. The Flappy Bird bot is up to 147 points and going strong. [Shi Xuekun] and [Liu Yang], two hackers from China, have taken full responsibility for this hack. They used OpenCV with a webcam on Ubuntu to determine the position of both the bird and the pipes. Once positions are known, the computer calculates the next move. When it’s time to flap, a signal is sent to an Arduino Mega 2560. The genius of this hack is the actuator. Most servos or motors would have been too slow for this application. [Shi] and [Liu] used the Arduino and a motor driver to activate a hard drive voice coil. The voice coil was fast enough to touch the screen at exactly the right time, but not so powerful as to smash their tablet.

If you would like to make flapping a bit more of a physical affair, [Jérémie] created Flappy Bird with Kinect. He wrote a quick Processing sketch which uses the Microsoft Kinect to look for humans flapping their arms. If flapping is detected, a command is sent to an Android tablet. [Jérémie] initially wanted to use Android Debug Bridge (ADB) to send the touch commands, but found it was too laggy for this sort of hardcore gaming. The workaround is to use a serial connected Arduino as a mouse. The Processing sketch sends a ‘#’ to the Arduino via serial. The Arduino then sends a mouse click to the computer, which is running hidclient. Hidclient finally sends Bluetooth mouse clicks to the tablet. Admittedly, this is a bit of a Rube Goldberg approach, but it does add an Arduino to a Flappy Bird hack, which we think is a perfect pairing.

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Android+Arduino – Face Following RC Car

January 15, 2014 by Kevin Darrah 25 Comments

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To some of us, hacking an RC Car to simply follow a black line or avoid obstacles is too easy, and we’re sure [Shazin] would agree with that, since he created an RC Car that follows your face!

The first step to this project was to take control of the RC Car, but instead of hijacking the transmitter, [Shazin] decided to control the car directly. This isn’t any high-end RC Car though, so forget about PWM control. Instead, a single IC (RX-2) was found to handle both the RF Receiver and H-Bridges. After a bit of probing, the 4 control lines (forward/back and left/right) were identified and connected to an Arduino.

[Shazin] paired the Arduino with a USB Host Shield and connected it up with his Android phone through the ADB (Android Debug Bridge). He then made some modifications to the OpenCV Android Face Detection app to send commands to the Arduino based on ‘where’ the Face is detected; if the face is in the right half of the screen, turn right, if not, turn left and go forward.

This is a really interesting project with a lot of potential; we’re just hoping [Shazin] doesn’t have any evil plans for this device like strapping it to a Tank Drone that locks on to targets!

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Your Mouse Is A Terrible Webcam

January 14, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 48 Comments

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It should come as no surprise your optical mouse contains a very tiny, very low resolution camera. [Franci] decided to take apart one of his old mice and turn that tiny optical sensor into a webcam.

Inside [Franci]’s Logitech RX 250 is an ADNS-5020 optical sensor. This three wire SPI device stuffed into an 8-pin package is a 15×15 pixel grayscale image sensor. [Franci] started this project by bringing out the Arduino and Ethernet shield. After soldering a pull-up resistor to the image sensor’s reset pin, connecting the rest of the circuit was as simple as soldering a few wires to the Arduino.

The Arduino sketch sends the image data for each pixel to a computer over a serial connection. A bit of javascript and a touch of HTML takes this pixel data and turns it into a webpage with a live view of whatever is directly under [Franci]’s mouse.

Video of the mousewebcam in action below.

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