When we introduced you to the Twitter Christmas tree ornaments, sadly we had very little information about the project. Luckily [Rob] made contact and clued us in on the inner workings. It even turns out we were wrong about the usage of Arduinos! We invite you to check out all the juicy inner workings after the break.
Continue reading “Twitter Based Christmas Ornaments Update”
[Karsten Nohl], with a group of security researchers has broken the A5/1 Stream Cipher behind GSM. Their project web site discusses their work and provides slides(pdf) presented at 26C3. A5/1 has had known vulnerabilities for some time now and is scheduled to be phased out for the newer KASUMI or A5/3 block cipher. This should be an interesting time in the cell phone business.
Thanks to [Tyco] and [MashupMark] for pointing us to this story.
Hackaday is going to the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. This year’s show runs January 7-10 and we’re going to use every minute to scout out hacking’s past and future. We’re looking for hacks from the past that have made it into new, commercially available electronics. We also want to get a look at the products that we’ll all be cracking open at some point in the future.
Do you know of something being exhibited that we shouldn’t miss? Tell us what to look out for in the comments.
Former HaD’er [Phillip Torrone] has written an extensive collection of Open Source Hardware projects for Make Magazine. This impressive list covers over 125 projects and kits, broken into 19 categories including 3d Printing, Music, Robotics, and Wireless systems. A number of these projects have been either extensively detailed or mentioned on HaD, so there is bound to be something for everyone here.
[Phillip] is not only detailing these projects for people new to the Open Source Hardware movement, but is also calling for new and unheard of projects to be listed in places like this, as well as central locations such as the OSH Wikipedia page. We are sure that a number of HaD readers will be answer this challenge.
Thanks again to [Phillip] for sharing this with us.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXuxK6IeQfo&feature=player_embedded%5D
MIT is debuting their latest advancement in technology, a multitouch screen that also functions as a gestural interface. The multitouch aspect is nothing new, the team explains how traditional interfaces using LEDs or camera systems do work, but fail to recognize gestures off-screen.
Gestures are a relatively recent highlight with the introduction of projects like Natal or perspective tracking, but fail to work at closer distances to the screen. MIT has done what seems the impossible by combining and modifying the two to produce the first ever multitouch close proximity gestural display.
And to think, just a couple of months ago the same school was playing with pop-up books.
[via Engadget]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tdqk6fedeGY]
[Johhny chung Lee], eat your heart out. Check out what these guys are doing with face tracking and immersive 3d as their final project in class. They’re using a singe camera and an FPGA to produce the demo you see in the video. Facial tracking is done by skin color, so that might have some issues in some environments, but being able to have perspective shift with you, without rigging up some more hardware is fantastic.
We realize that this is completely different that what [Johnny] is doing. We love [Johnny]’s work and think it is ground breaking to be able to pull this stuff off with a cheap game controller. We just couldn’t help but draw the parallel from the end result.
[thanks Bruce]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cB6vSHDDdhI]
We really love this version of super mario brothers that [Brad] is putting together. It is played on an 8×8 RGB LED screen, powered by a pic microprocessor. There aren’t many details on the construction or code yet, but we expect he’ll publish it soon. We’re guessing it is very similar to his other 8×8 game system. If you really want to get a jump start, he has published some great tutorials on working with pic microprocessors.
[via instructables]
