classic hacks

2768 Articles

Hacking Pleo For Face Recognition And Remote Control

August 7, 2008 by 4 Comments


GRIP, the Group for Interdisciplinary Psychology at the University of Bamberg have put together a couple tutorials on hacking the Pleo. For those unfamiliar, the Pleo is a small robot shaped like a dinosaur. Their goal was to make it cute and simulate emotion at a higher level than previously attained by consumer robots. Ugobe, the makers of Pleo encourage hacking of the unit and the controlling software. Look at the “developers” area of their site to download all kinds of tools to work on your Pleo.

The two tutorials released by GRIP cover adding wireless communication with a PC and adding a higher resolution camera to the unit. The goal was to make the platform capable of doing facial recognition.

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Hybrid Headphone Amplifier

August 6, 2008 by 4 Comments


[Rogers Gomez] has posted up this hybrid tube based headphone amplifier over at DIY Audio. Being a fan of tube amplifiers, but wanting something with lower voltage and lower cost, he put together this little system out of spare parts he had lying around. He wanted it to have as few parts as possible and be able to power his 32 ohm Grado headphones.

He states that he’d built several YAHA amps, and a Szekeres Mosfet follower and was curious how they’d sound together. He was pleasantly surprised with the resulting quality.

There are less than 30 individual components involved in the project. The complete parts list and schematics are available from the site. He notes at the very end, to unplug your headphones when powering up as there is a surge that could damage them. That might be good to know at the beginning just in case you get eager to test it out.

[Thanks, Gio]

Deogen, Tiny Monitor Tester

August 5, 2008 by 5 Comments


Deogen is a small, self contained device for testing monitors. It was designed back in 2000 to reduce the amount of space and effort required to test monitors in a computer shop. The initial design used an AT90S1200 microcontroller to generate test patterns for the monitors. Being about the size of a portable CD player, it was much easier to take to any monitor and plug in for testing.

Version two of the device, pictured above, is much smaller, being about the width and height of a credit card. The depth is slightly larger than a 9 volt battery. Compared to the last vga test project we ran, this one is tiny. The unit boasts a decent set of features, such as; eight test patterns at four different resolutions, battery or DC power, and small form factor.

The processor of version two is an ATtiny2313 at 20MHz, and controls the H sync and V sync signals directly. The RGB is converted to analog using a resister network. The power circuit is custom made for low power consumption, though they note that a 78L05 equivalent unit could be used in its place.

The plans for the PCB and the software are available from their site. Head on over and check out some pictures of it in action.

[Thanks, Philip Fitzgerald]

How-To: The Hacker’s Soldering Station

August 5, 2008 by 51 Comments


A good soldering station and fume extractor is a must for anyone interested in hacking and modding, but not everyone can afford the expensive professional models on the market. This How-To and the tips within it will guide you through the process of building an inexpensive homebrew fume hood complete with built-in time and temperature controlled soldering station and all the soldering tools you need.

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Build A Simple Bat Detector

August 4, 2008 by 8 Comments


[Tony Messina] had been fascinated with bat’s echolocation since he was a kid. After he retired, he decided to act on this fascination and built a simple bat detector.

The simple bat detector uses frequency division to lower the bat’s chirping to a frequency we can hear. For example, if a bat is calling at 91kHz the system will divide it by 16 and put out 5.7kHz. The system is digital, so all amplitude is lost. You’ll just hear clicks like a Geiger counter. Being digital has its advantages though. Unlike similar analog devices that have to be tuned to a small frequency range, the simple bat detector can detect a much wider window.

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Laser Etching Printed Circuit Boards

August 3, 2008 by 23 Comments


While we hope you enjoyed our How-To: Etch a printed circuit board, toner transfer certainly isn’t the only way to get the job done. [Garrett] from macetech has recently been playing around with using an Epilog laser to etch PCBs. He started by applying a thin even coat of flat black spray paint to the copper board. The laser is used to remove paint in areas that you want the copper removed. Once that’s done, you proceed with etching as usual. He eventually removed the paint mask using acetone. The result has very fine, sharp traces, but most people that have tried this agree that using spray paint is less than ideal.

StickDuino, USB Stick Arduino Clone

August 2, 2008 by 7 Comments


The Arduino hardware clones keep rolling in. This weeks entry into the modern dev board’s roster is the StickDuino. The board is designed to be fully hardware compatible and plugs directly into your USB port. The StickDuino uses all SMD components. The creators know that this can make assembly more difficult so they’ve space the components out, opted for larger pads, and collected some links to SMD tutorials. The board feature two more analog inputs than the Diecimila and it has a jumper so you can switch it to 3.3V. All around it looks like a great product; frankly we love anything with full board layouts.