Misc Hacks

4181 Articles

24C3 Hacking DNA

January 5, 2008 by 28 Comments

[Drew Endy]’s Programming DNA talk was by far the most interesting talk we saw at Chaos Communication Congress. No, DNA doesn’t have much to do with computers, but he points out that hacking principles can be applied just the same. Right now engineers are reversing genetic code and compiling building blocks for creating completely arbitrary organisms. This talk was designed to bootstrap the hacking community so that we can start using and contributing standard biological parts to an open source collection of genetic functions.

You should definitely watch the video to get a good idea of where biohacking is at today. You can find a higher quality version of the video in the archives.

DIY Rotomolding

January 1, 2008 by 2 Comments


Rotomolding is used to create hollow forms by slowing rotating a mold while the material covers and hardens to the shape of the mold. [ds] built this version using a stepper motor to drive the assembly and a belt drive link An extreme version is used to form whitewater kayaks and other plastics. This thread over at cnczone has a rotisserie oven version that looks ideal for small plastic or wax molding.

Happy New Year Extra

December 31, 2007 by 11 Comments


Goodbye 1167627600 –1199167140 1199163540.

[Justin] is having fun telling everyone that an exploit has been found for the Archos 605 media player. The hack gets you remote root access on the player… need I say more?

[Gene] sent in his polar coordinate based LEGO 3d printer. He’s still working on the driver end, but it’s an interesting project.

[Kyle] sent in the gutting of his flip video camera.

Need some new storage? [forrest] sent in his price/GB price comparison script. It scrapes New Egg and graphs out the results.

Despite the link on our old post being dead, [Txoof] built his own CCFL macro light from a dead laptop LCD.

[Dan] sent in his LED cube matrix. The LEDs are wired in a matrix, so he can actually address them individually.

Frostbot: CNC Cookie Frosting

December 30, 2007 by 10 Comments


[Brian Schmalz] sent in his Frostbot. It’s a fun CNC bot project that he built to frost cookies for his latest holiday party. He (wussed out a bit) and started with a kit based CNC machine, but he made up for it by driving it with his own control hardware (that sparkfun happens to have for sale). His USB bit wacker interface certainly looks interesting – I might consider adding it in front of the stepper controllers on my cnc mill. Especially interesting is the HPGL interpreter software that converts graphics to stepper commands via the bit whacker interface.

Raid Your Network File Shares

December 29, 2007 by 6 Comments


[Motoma] sent in his take on the virtual RAID 5 post. He didn’t like the layered system requirements, so he put together a proof of concept that only requires a Linux box. For his proof, he used a NFS share, a SMB share and did everything from the command line. He didn’t cover FTP, but the Gentoo wiki has a nice cheat sheet for mounting FTP and folders over SSH if you want some alternatives. He uses some very interesting partition tricks to make things happen. If you need some help to get things rolling, the Ubuntu forums software raid how-to is a good place to start.

DIY Wakeboarding Winch

December 28, 2007 by 11 Comments


[exhaltingidiotz] is just one of the guys who’s built his own wakeboard winch. These things are pretty low tech, but using a winch to wakeboard has to be one of the most original ideas that I’ve seen in a while. Winches have some interesting advantages over boats: less fuel, no licensing and shallow water that no boat or jet ski would ever work in suddenly becomes usable. Here’s a basic design that’s typical and a simple demo video. The forums are a bit annoying to search for info, so here’s a fantastic winch build writeup.

Arduino Controlled Espresso Machine

December 26, 2007 by 5 Comments


The arduino is really starting to become prevalent for hardware hacking. [Nash] used one to take control of his Gaggia espresso machine. (They’re really decent little machines) He popped in a LCD display, some solid state relays to control the pump and the heating element, and an AD595 to interface a K type thermocouple. It looks like an excellent hack, but for the love of god man – get a better grinder!

He describes the original mod here, and added a small gallery of internal shots here. From the latest comments, it looks like the guys are RepRap project are even interested in the thermocouple PID control that [Nash] implemented.