The newly released Palm Pre has been torn down by both Rapid Repair and iFixit. They note the easy to use interface, but the slide out keyboard makes for weird transitions. There’s nothing surprising on the hardware side except capacitive screen and LCD come as a single unit and would have to be replaced together if either fails.
UPDATE: phoneWreck’s analysis
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Remote-Exploit.org is releasing Keykeriki, a wireless keyboard sniffer. The project is both open source hardware and software. you can download the files on their site. Right now you can’t get a pre made board, but they plan on releasing one soon. The system can be upgraded with “backpacks” or add on modules. One of these is going to be an LCD that displays the keystrokes of the keyboard you are sniffing. Another is supposed to serve as an interface to your iPhone. Right now it has the ability to decode Microsoft wireless keyboards, but the Logitech pieces should be added soon.
Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has released the 2313 target board. A business card sized development board for working with ATTiny 2313 microprocessors. We saw them at the Maker Faire, and thought they looked familiar. You may recognize them due to their similarity to the Atmegaxx8 family board. As usual, this is released as creative commons and source files are available on their site.
[John Park] has managed to snag a couple interesting business cards at Maker Faire. The first is Adafruit’s laser cut Spirograph card. The other is a ATtiny2313 prototyping board from Evil Mad Science; it looks to be the same style as their well-known AVR target board. We’ve also heard rumors that [Jérôme Demers] has bunch of resistor bending cards.
For more business card nonsense, check out: [Goodspeed]’s smart card emulator, [Mayer]’s embedded gears, and our web server business card.
Engadget has video from the June 2009 episode of Qore that shows the new PSP Go. It has a slide out gamepad, 16GB internal storage, bluetooth, and a memory slot of some sort. We’re naturally curious about its potential as a homebrew platform. Will Sony take the mature route they did with the PS3 and let you run Linux or will they continue the firmware arms race the PSP is known for? We’ll be hearing more about this platform at E3 next week.
Maker Faire returns to the San Francisco Bay Area this weekend. It’s “the World’s Largest DIY Festival”. We’ve been attending off and on since 2006 and you’re sure to catch many of the projects we’ve covered in the past. Be sure to stop by our favorite hackers that will be in attendance: mightyOhm, macetech, SparkFun, Liquidware, Jeri Ellsworth, Bleep Labs, Noisebridge, Ani Niow, EMSL, and Adafruit. If you’re attending, upload your photos to the Hack a Day Flickr pool and let us know what you see.
[photo: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid]
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June 6th is the date of the upcoming Global Hackday. This time, focusing on cheap tangible interfaces, mainly trackmate. They want as many people to join as possible, even if you’re not comfortable with code. We’ve covered the construction of the trackmate surface before, now build one and get in there and contribute.
