[Travers Buda] is giving new life to his abandoned childhood toys. He cracked open a set of Family Radio Services radios he had received for a birthday which work up to 2 kilometers apart. With just a bit of extra circuitry he was able to get them to act as wireless modems. The system functions but it looks like it would benefit from some more refinement, including error correction. In the end [Travers] manages to send and receive ASCII based messages at a whopping baud rate of 10.
[Travis Goodspeed] has pulled apart a TurningPoint response card, which is an RF device for answering quizzes, attendance checks, and casting votes in a classroom setting. After tearing it apart, he set out to reverse engineer it and managed to get quite a lot done. At this point he can spoof cards, so he could fake his or several people’s attendance. He can also sniff the packets as they are sent, opening up a plethora of opportunities to mischief. The one that was mentioned in the tip line was to simply repeat the answer that was most often sent for the quizzes. The writeup is very detailed and has great pictures. Good job [Travis].
[thanks Springuin]
[Andrew Jenner] pulled off something amazing with this Physical Tone Matrix. He wanted to build a physical version of a flash applet he had seen. Two layers make up the main user interface. The top layer is a sheet of acrylic that acts as a touch interface and below there’s an LED matrix. [Andrew’s] touch interface uses wires running throughout the acrylic as contacts which are polled via transistor pairs. As you can see in the video after the break it works well and we like the fact that there’s a tactile component (due to the bumpy wires) you don’t get when working with a touchscreen.
The 16×16 grid of LEDs on the bottom layer correspond to each ‘button’ on the touch matrix hand have some extra functions such as playing Conway’s Game of Life. This fantastic build still has a couple of kinks to work out, most notably the interference in the audio circuit, but we’re quite impressed at what he’s achieved quickly. Plus, this is more economical than a monome and larger than some of the monome clones we’ve seen.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_jwcCseDk0]
[Dale Dougherty] interviews [Steven Levy] about the history of hacking. [Levy]’s book Hackers has been released in a 25th anniversary edition. The interview alone is fascinating and the book is a must read for any hacker. If they offered a course in hacker culture somewhere, we’re positive that this book would be the textbook. The 25th anniversary edition has been updated to include major figures from the last 25 years including [Bill Gates], [Steve Wozniak] and others that have impacted our lives drastically.
[via MakeZine]
The Genearic HID tool is meant as an easy way to create your own human interface devices. The project has the added benefit of showing us how to hack the hardware on the AT90USBKey developement board. The AVR-based device, which we saw used to make an SNES cartridge reader, comes in at just over $30 but with a few caveats. First, the breakout pads for the pins are not 0.1″ pitch and require some creative soldering to get at them easily. But the walk through also covers converting the board to run at 5v when in USB host mode, and altering the populated components to reclaim pins on the AT90USB1287 chip. The fun isn’t limited to this board, there’s also a home brew alternative based around the same chip.
[Thanks Juan]
[Markus] built his own reverse geocache puzzle box but on a smaller scale than the original. His is based around a PIC 18F2520 and powered by two AAA batteries. The user interface includes one button, a 16×2 character LCD, and a piezo speaker. The box unlocks itself when the GPS module inside detects the proper location on the globe. There is also a secret code that can be tapped on the button to unlock the box prematurely, and another to show the locations in which the user attempted to open the box. This build doesn’t leave much room for a payload, but [Markus] did a great job designing the board and making the components fit as efficiently as possible.
[Greg Charvat] really wanted high resolution X-Band linear rail SAR imaging system. He wanted it bad enough to scrounge through parts at HAM radio swap meets until he had the bits to build one himself. The unit is used to take high resolution radar imaging. For example, the image above is constructed of push pins behind a foam wall. The synthetic aperture radar system came in at roughly $250. Not bad at all. You may have to dig through the links a bit to find the build information. Be sure to check out the hardware gallery and the schematics(pdf).
[via Makezine]
