This is one of those things that has annoyed me for so long, that I’m putting it up. I have despised, no, I have friggin loathed the quality of 1/8″ (3.5mm) cables. Cables are pretty easy; just clip, strip and solder away, right? Right. If you grew up cursed with the junk that rat shack carries, you know my pain. So, if you hate those crappy cables as much as I do, go check out this lovely little write up on making quality interconnects. (Now if I could just find a 2.5mm connector like that switchcraft 3.5mm to fix this spare apple power supply)
Misc Hacks4086 Articles
Inker – The Hand Inkjet
One of our Hackaday favorites, [Sprite_tm] made my morning when he sent this in. He built a driver circuit for a HP inkjet cartridge that allows him to print by hand. Ideal for printing on other people, their white boards or their beer. He had to do some blackbox reverse engineering to figure out what the onboard driver chip does on the cartridge. Considering the task, the circuit is surprisingly simple. It has some ATTINY brains, some driver transistors, a data bus and a DC/DC power converter to get the required 1.21 gigawatts, er 20 volts to drive the cartridge.
Saturday Morning Extra
Storage element keychain. Allright, it’s cool, but almost criminal.
Hack a wireless doorbell into a remote relay. It’s allright, but I like the Mr. House + APRS tracking better.
[Josh and PsychoRNGD] both sent in the mindstorm NXT laser hack (Replace the LED in a light unit with a laser pointer diode)
Matt sent along his XBox 180. I dig it just because it gets rid of all those friggin wires.
[XanTium] points out that MS’s latest drive in the 360 takes things to a few extremes to block firmware hacking.
[Mike] let us know that after all the grief he got here, he built an aux to female ipod cable for his sound-dock. (He got his femal ipod connector from Ridax, but Sparkfun now carries a surface mount version)
You guys sent in some great tips this week. Keep em comin. I’ve been busy, but I’m going to hunt down the floating ads and get them taken care of.
Voting Machine Chess
[Floor] sent in this PDF [I’ve mirrored it here] describing how to get a game of chess running on a dutch voting machine. (Even better, it describes how to monitor who’s voting for what via RF emissions) They did a thorough job of hacking the daylights out of it and proving the insecurity on these machines. You can get some more details on the web site.
Toorcon Anonymous Presentation
I promised that I’d follow up on some Toorcon stuff later this week, so here it is. I believe I was present for the first ever anonymous presentation at a con. I’ve been waiting for the presentation information to get posted on the TOR wiki, and today I finally found it. The presentation is from the TRON: HE FIGHTS FOR THE USER talk. The idea worked out very well. We could hear the presenter quite well the entire time The combination of TOR, VNC, and Ventrillo was unique. We were even able to ask the speaker questions at the end. The talk opens up some very interesting possibilities. Instead of being able to arrest someone before/after a talk, someone could present on a controversial issue with less fear of corporate/government fallout. Check out the wiki page for more information.
C64 Alpha Mod
David Terrill sent in his new c64 project. It’s almost an end-all c64 mod. He lopped off the back half of the case, added s-video, a piggybacked secondary sound chip, 1/4″ audio, stereo input, audio feedback, a serial port, DIN sync… and more. If you dig c64s or hardware bending, check out his write up.
Hackaday Extra
I spent 14 hours at airports today, after staying up all night. My internet access at Toorcon was bandwith starved, so I wanted to catch up a bit. I’ll try to highlight more Toorcon stuff later in the week.
[Clinton] and [bart] both sent in Clinton’s electric shock alarm clock. (Don’t even think about building one of these things, it could kill someone if you’re not careful.)
[capagotks] sent in his USB refitted hand crank LED flashlight.
I got this a few times, so here’s a simple work surface made from an old PC case. (I use self healing cutting mats.)
[Ian] presents us with a bunch of cell phone repair (and upgrade?) information. Let me know if you actually rebuild a broken phone. The most likely scenario would be LCD replacement.
[Jim] sent in these candy(sugar) powered rockets. sweet!
Finally, [Leigh Norton] in Essex (Yes, Essex.) has an HP pen plotter like the one used to make a vinyl cutter. Post if you want it and maybe he’ll give it to you.
