today and tomorrow found a few more projects using computer hardware to create music like our earlier Radiohead post. Above is a rendition of The Imperial March using a 3.5 inch floppy drive. Two more projects are embedded below.
home entertainment hacks796 Articles
Wii Dual NAND Flash Hack
[ChipD] successfully installed two NAND flash chips into his Wii. He can keep the stock firmware on one and then flip a switch if he wants to boot using the other chip with a modified firmware. This hack is fairly straight forward. All it took was someone with steady hands to try it out. The new NAND chip is identical to the original and was salvaged from a flash drive. The chips were soldered as a stack except for the chip enable pin. The chip enable from each chip is attached to a small switch to toggle between which is active. You could use a TSOP socket to swap the different chips, but it wouldn’t fit inside the Wii case. This little switch could be hidden easily next to the GameCube ports.
DIY Slingbox
[David] took some interesting steps to put together his own Slingbox-ish setup. He used a Mac mini running Quicktime Broadcaster to capture the stream from a Firewire video camera which his cable/satellite receiver is plugged into. You’ll have to use an OS X machine, but that’s not too difficult these days. Broadcaster is about the simplest way to capture from Firewire and stream. We’re using it in our own office to multicast the signal from a Canadian satellite box.
LCD Projector Repair
[Kieth] picked up an Infocus projector only to find that it needed some repair. The polarizer on the blue light path was toast. When he parted out an Optoma projector he scored a polarizer that was just about right for the repair. It’s a good read even if you don’t have a projector in pieces at the moment. He ended up bending the mounting bracket a bit to hold the filter and got his projector fully up and running again.
Touchscreen Turntables, Scratching Without Vinyl
While we were researching the AudioCubes, we ran into this amazing DJ system by designer [Scott Hobbs]. He calls it the ATTIGO TT, and it uses two touchscreens to simulate the turntables on a conventional system. More technical details after the break.
Continue reading “Touchscreen Turntables, Scratching Without Vinyl”
Cheap Projector Repair
[Ryan] sent in this writeup on some DIY projector repair. The write-up is a little hard to follow, but maybe it’ll inspire some future projector landfill saves. [Dissident] replaced the light bulb and ballast in an older DLP projector with some salvaged MR-16 hardware from an even older over head projector. The main trick required was to bridge the trigger leads that tell the projector that the bulb is on and working.
DISH Wins $1050 In Satellite Cracking Case
Who doesn’t love a good corporate espionage story? We certainly don’t mind them, especially when they involve hiring a notable hacker to do the company’s dirty work. It seems this is exactly what happened in the case of Dish Networks vs NDS Group. Last month, Christopher Tarnovsky admitted he was paid $20,000 in cash to crack the security protocols used on DISH Network access cards. NDS Group claimed the reverse engineering was simply for comparative reasons while DISH is said it resulted in $900 million in damages.
The trial came to an end this week with the court finding NDS group guilty of cracking 1 card (a fine of $49.69) and liable for an additional $1000 in damages. Not quite the big payoff DISH was hoping for, but both companies have expressed feelings of vindication about the decision. DISH Networks says that the jury ruled in their favor, proving that they were right all along (just not $900 million dollars right). NDS maintains that Tarnovsky’s work was never publicly shared and that they never intended to flood the black market with cracked cards as DISH has implied.
