DIY Print Head Experiments

October 13, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 5 Comments

Inkjet printheads are a pretty rare thing to see done in home workshops. We would love to see more and got really excited when we saw this single nozzle, drop on demand, head being built. using a piezo disk intended to be a cheap buzzer and some reprap magic, [Johnrpm] got some results. [Madscifi] has been refining the design of the nozzle and the two have shared the process with us. Since it drops a single droplet of liquid, it can be used in a variety of manners, such as dropping plain old boring ink, or dropping a solvent into a powder for some 3d printing. You can see an example of the 3d printing in sugar above.

[via Makezine]

Build A Simple Switch

October 5, 2010 by Mike Szczys 27 Comments

Forget hacking an easy button, grab a couple of those outdated CD-Rs and build your own switch for that next project. This was developed with handicapped accessibility in mind; assembled easily with common products and it’s fairly robust. In fact, our junk box has everything you need except the adhesive backed copper foil. Combine two old CD’s, covered in copper on facing sides, separated by two strips of Velcro to separate the conductors. When pressure is applied, one CD flexes to make contact with the other and complete the circuit. So easy, yet we never thought of it. We’ll add it to our list of homebrew input devices.

[Thanks Michael]

More OpenWRT Image Building For The Dockstar

October 4, 2010 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

[Der_picknicker] wrote in to let us know about a guide to building OpenWRT images for the dockstar (translated). What they end up with is a nice little network attached storage device that runs SAMBA and subversion under the umbrella of OpenWRT. We looked at flashing and building OpenWRT images for this device back in July. The development branch of OpenWRT hasn’t quite reached a stable release yet, but much has been done in the last few months.

The machine translation is a little rough, but the compilation process is easy enough to follow. If you don’t care to slog through compiling (which apparently takes 1-2 hours) they’ve also made their images available for download. It should be possible to flash via SSH but you might want to add a serial port to the device just to be safe.

IR Receiver As USB Keyboard

October 4, 2010 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

[Arthur] built an IR receiver to use with XBMC. Because it’s software specific he identifies the device on USB as a keyboard, and passes the IR commands as keystrokes used by the popular media platform.

Normally, homebrew IR receivers would use LIRC, the Linux Infrared Remote Control software. But this method doesn’t require you to have that running. In fact, it doesn’t need any setup on the PC end of things. Any remote that uses the Sony SIRC protocol will work off the bat.

[Arthur] chose a PIC 18f2550 for the project. It is a popular microcontroller because it has built-in USB handling. We’re a bit skeptical of the hardware design though. We didn’t see specifically which IR receiver he’s using, but many require some type of filtering so check the suggested layout in the datasheet for your module.

USB Ports Hidden Inside Gaming Mouse

October 2, 2010 by Mike Szczys 26 Comments

[Gigawatts] built a pair of USB ports into his mouse and there’s enough room to plug-in small USB drives and dongles. After seeing Thursday’s storage mouse hack he decided to tip us off about the post.

He started with a Logitech G5 gaming mouse. The wireless version of this mouse has a battery pack, but on the corded version this space is used for a weight cartridge. Since he didn’t really care about that feature he ditched the weights, added a USB hub inside, and positioned the dual ports as seen in the photo. The void is deep enough for the mouse to function normally while hosting medium to small-sized devices. This is a fantastic solution that’s at least as impressive as Apple adding USB ports to a keyboard. We’d love to see it as a factory option.

Update: Video after the break

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USB Mouse With Storage Added

September 30, 2010 by Mike Szczys 31 Comments

[Thice] wanted to try his hand at incorporating a USB driving into other devices. He chose to add storage to his USB mouse but didn’t want to alter the factory look provided by a color-changing LED inside. To make things fit he ended up cutting a good portion of a USB hub’s circuit board off and placing it beneath the mouse circuitry. You can see the board from the thumb drive wedged into one end of the case in the image above.

He sees this as a way of hiding data in plain sight. This is true, and it’s along the same lines we’ve seen before with a WiFi dongle in a mouse, or the thumbdrive in a controller hacks. To be truly hidden we’d like to see someone incorporate a microcontroller that monitors the mouse buttons for a certain code, and then toggles the voltage to the USB storage. This would simulate plugging and unplugging the drive, hiding it virtually as well as physically.

Input Device Using LED And Four Photoresistors

September 22, 2010 by Mike Szczys 38 Comments

[Julien] built an input device that uses reflected light detected by some photoresistors. Placing your hand above the device will reflect light from the LED back down onto the cadmium-sulfide sensors. The resistance of those sensors is read by four ADC pins on a Teensy microcontroller and translated to mouse movements. In the video after the break you can see that this works rather well in controlling the cursor. The source code is available on pastebin but we’re also going to host the code for posterity.

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