Misc Hacks

4181 Articles

Honeycomb Tire Won’t Go Flat

November 17, 2008 by 46 Comments

A new breed of tire has been developed that won’t go flat, even if it gets bombed. Resilient Technologies L.L.C. has started making these decidedly cool looking tires for the military. The honeycomb of stiff but flexible plastic acts as a shock absorber just as an air filled tire would. Unlike a normal tire, it won’t pop. You would have to completely destroy the tire to stop these. The article mentions that this isn’t the first of its kind. Michelin has made the “tweel” for industrial uses, but you may recall the video of the Audi driving around a course using them. If not, check it out after the break.

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Case Prototyping

November 16, 2008 by 11 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsqNPXCm3jc]

[Deviant Ollam], lockpicker and beverage cooling contest host, was recently in Vienna, presumably for DeepSec. While there, he stopped by the Metalab hackerspace and checked out their RepRap rapid prototyping machine. You can see video of his visit above. He had them construct a custom fitted cover for the flash of his point and shoot camera. That’s what we love about rapid prototyping. Many of the projects we cover here solve a particular problem, but would never be considered commercially viable enough to put into production. With the availability of rapid prototyping increasing, hackers can start moving toward producing even more complex objects specific to their needs with a finish closer to commercial products.

Overhauling LED Marquees

November 14, 2008 by 11 Comments

led-sign

In a previous job, [sprite_tm] was responsible for wrangling many different LED text ad marquees. The hardware was fairly simple and he always figured they could be pushed much further with a little work. He recently acquired ten 32×16 LED displays a decided to see what he could do with them. By the end of the project, he had full motion video running on the display. This is a great project to read up on if you’ve ever wondered about LED matrix displays. He starts by reverse engineering the electronics on the board. He then attached an ATmega88 to drive the display module. Multiple display modules were daisy chained together over serial. The article covers PWM control and refresh timing as well. Check out one of a few demo videos below. Continue reading “Overhauling LED Marquees” →

Scratch Built RFID Tags

November 11, 2008 by 17 Comments

rfid

[nmarquardt] has put up an interesting instructable that covers building RFID tags. Most of them are constructed using adhesive copper tape on cardstock. The first version just has a cap and a low power LED to prove that the antenna is receiving power. The next iteration uses tilt switches so the tag is only active in certain orientations. The conclusion shows several different variations: different antenna lengths, conductive paint, light activated and more.

Messing With Barcodes

November 10, 2008 by 13 Comments

stencil

[nico] just received his credentials for an upcoming conference. On each badge, there’s a 2D barcode with the participant’s bio and contact info. These are meant to be scanned by vendors for future contact. [nico] isn’t so interested in that and plans on updating his personal info by generating a new barcode. To this end, he’s collected a number of links to help out barcode hackers. He used the SWIPE toolkit to identify the format and decode (it has an online component too). There are also several online encoders you can use, like this one from [Terry Burton]. If you’re wondering what sort of shenanigans you can get into faking barcodes, check out [fx]’s presentation from 24C3.

[photo: seanbonner]

Easy High Voltage Power Supply

November 10, 2008 by 16 Comments

hv_supply

[rocketman221] wrote up one of the simplest ways to build a high voltage power supply. This one in particular was used on his coilgun. Instead of building a custom circuit, he’s using flash charging boards from disposable cameras. Six 450V 470uF caps are wired in parallel to make up the bank. Two of the charger boards are wired to one switch to initiate the charging process. Four additional boards are wired two a second switch for the second charging stage. The part cost on this is incredibly cheap and it only requires a 3.3V input to reach 450V. The writeup has plenty of warnings about the dangers of high voltage; you need to clean off all flux residue to prevent arcing across the circuit boards. Embedded below is a video of the bank being discharged through several objects. Continue reading “Easy High Voltage Power Supply” →