Using an original Power Glove, a bluetooth module, an Arduino, and an accelerometer, [Biphenyl] brought the system up to date. As you can see in the video after the break, the new version is wireless and much more useful in the games. Skip to 11 minutes in if you just want to see it in action. There’s a full writeup on Instructables if you want to build your own. We love the power glove and we can’t wait to see a more developed game for it. This beats the Power Glove Wiimote, hands down.
[Epoch] Sent in this simple head tracking project using Lego pieces. He’s made a custom mount to hold 3 Lego light sensors on a baseball cap. Then, after modifying his webcam for IR with some floppy disk scraps, he loads up the free-track software and can control his games. For convenience, he has programmed the Lego Nxt to only turn on the lights while he’s holding a contact sensor. You can see it in action after the break. This appears to be very similar to [Johnny Lee’s] head tracking. Judging by the video, it’s not as smooth though.
Almost exactly a year ago, we posted the random USB capslocker. [Garrett] has revisited the idea to build a smaller, neater version. He has posted the build process to give us an idea how he goes about building things. The overall build is quite nice, but part if its neatness can be attributed to the fact that he had access to an Epilog laser cutter. If you think you might be using one in the near future, this is a great writeup for you.
[via the Hack a Day flickr pool]
[Eddie], who made the Mac Logo LCD Mod, had posted a step by step tutorial on how to do it yourself. He basically just fully disassembled his MacBook, popped out the logo, put one from an iBook or Powerbook, then mounted a small LCD back there and routed it into a USB port internally. He says the extra electronics cause a tiny bulge in the monitor casing. We wonder if this couldn’t lead to stress damage on the main LCD in the long run.
[thanks Koray]
[vimeo=3952932]
[Tempt One] is a graffiti artist who has Lou Gehrig’s disease. He can no longer physically produce art, since his disease has taken his ability to control his arms. His friends, won’t let that be the end of it though. They’re building a visual tracking system to let him work by moving his eye. It seems like it would be very difficult to get any kind of a smooth curve out of eye movement, but the short demonstration video, which you can see after the break, does a decent job, at least for something this early in development. The source code isn’t released yet, but they do plan to do so. If you wanted to make your own, you could find some info in a past post of ours. We’re guessing they intend to use it with something along the lines of the laser tagging system.
Reader [Joshua] sent in his latest project. using a sonar rangefinder, an Arduino, and some clever programming, he’s made is computer react to his distance from it. As you can see in the video after the jump, he has programmed it to change text size and background color depending on his distance from the screen. While he admits that his implementation doesn’t seem immediately useful, there’s lots of potential there. We can actually think of several uses. What would you use it for?
Researchers from Inverse Path showed a couple interesting techniques for sniffing keystrokes at CanSecWest. For their first experiments they used a laser pointed at the shiny back of a laptop. The keystrokes would cause the laptop to vibrate which they could detect just like they would with any laser listening device. They’ve done it successfully from anywhere between 50 to 100 feet away. They used techniques similar to those in speech recognition to determine what sentences were being typed.
In a different attack, they sniffed characters from a PS/2 keyboard by monitoring the ground line in an outlet 50 feet away. They haven’t yet been able to collect more than just single strokes, but expect to get full words and sentences soon. This leakage via power line is discussed in the 1972 Tempest document we posted about earlier. The team said it wasn’t possible with USB or laptop keyboards.
[Thanks Jeramy]
