Decapping Integrated Circuits With Sap

July 16, 2010 by Mike Szczys 26 Comments

[James] is interested in reverse engineering some integrated circuits. One of the biggest hurdles in this process has always been just getting to the guts of the chip. He used acetone to dissolve the plastic case but had trouble getting through the epoxy blob. Commonly, the epoxy is soaked in nitric acid for a few minutes but [James] didn’t have access to that chemical. Instead he popped into the local music store and picked up some rosin (used to make violin bows sticky enough to grab the strings of the instrument). After boiling down the rock-hard rosin and the chip for 20 minutes, he got a clean and relatively undamaged semiconductor that he can easily peer into.

Nixie Sudoku

July 9, 2010 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

[John Sarik] asked himself why a project should only have a handful of Nixie tubes? Without a good answer to his query he went ahead and built this Sudoku game using 81 Nixie tubes. There’s not much of a description for his work but here’s how we think things go: The two knobs manipulate a cursor, one for rows and the other for columns, while the keypad is used to input your chosen number. The system is Arduino based and [John’s] linked to his code, schematic, and board layout files on Dropbox. He’s even written a recursive solver which can be seen in the video after the break. Would it be inappropriate to bring this to work and whip it out during some down time?

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Control A TV With GLCD Commands

July 8, 2010 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3gMjuVdQnA]

This hack lets you use a TV in place of a graphic LCD screen. But we like to think of this less as a replacement for a GLCD and more of a simple way to get your information onto a television. A PIC 18F452 acts as a translator between the GLCD parallel inputs and a composite video output. There are some malformed image links on the page which we’ve fixed and linked to after to the break so that you can take a look at the schematic, component layout, and PCB artwork. The assembler code and hex file are available for download but you’ll need to register to get access to them.

Working image links:

[Thanks Flacoclau]

Whole House Current Monitoring

July 7, 2010 by Mike Szczys 46 Comments

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

[Debraj Deb] put together a current monitoring device that interfaces with the circuit box at his house. The system is controlled by a PIC 18F4520 and uses an LM358 Op-Amp to rectify the AC signal, as well as an MCP6S21 for range adjustments for detecting both high or low current loads. The data displayed on a character LCD includes average, RMS, and peak current. For now the data is saved to an EEPROM and can be dumped using a serial connection but [Debraj] plans to add a GSM modem so he can send energy use data to his cell phone.

[Thanks Ganesh]

Texting With Some Walkie-talkies

July 7, 2010 by Mike Szczys 44 Comments

[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.

Reverse Engineering An RF Clicker

July 5, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 17 Comments

[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]

Physical Tone Matrix

June 30, 2010 by Mike Szczys 33 Comments

[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.

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