Peripherals Hacks

1561 Articles

Interactive Textile Construction

October 2, 2007 by 4 Comments

The e-textile construction kit by [Leah Buechley] consists of stitch-able sensors and microcontrollers. Stitch-able refers to the fact that these parts can be sewn with a needle and thread into wearable clothing or other fabric-based housings. A paper (PDF) on the e-textile construction kit project contains the first version. The second version of the e-textile construction kit, the LilyPad Arduino, is available this month through SparkFun’s site. Especially interesting are her instructions for modifying the clock speed on the Arduino to make it suitable for battery powered wearables.

We’ve covered [Leah Buechley]’s work twice in 2005 for her wearable led matrix work.

Update: [Leah] updated her site since we posted this and added this new how-to.

Read Every Bit On A DVD

September 30, 2007 by 16 Comments

If you are curious about reading all the bits on a DVD, [tmbinc] has devised a hardware hack that uses a Pioneer DVD drive with leads soldered onto it and a Cypress FX2 microcontroller board to grab the flow of bits and push them over USB2.0. My favorite part of this tutorial is when you slow the spinning DVD down very slightly with your finger with a scope hooked up over what you believe to be the raw data stream from the disk. If the data rate slows when you physically slow down the disk, you probably are grabbing data from the correct pin. [tmbinc] even put together a software tool to process the resulting raw DVD data.

USB 2.0 FPGA Based 24 Channel Logic Analyzer

September 27, 2007 by 13 Comments


[lekernel] sent in his USB logic analyzer. I might just have to build this one for my work bench. It’s based on an Altera Cyclone 2 FPGA and he’s provided full schematics, source and a quick and dirty Linux driver to get things going. The board is nearly all surface mount, but he points out that the entire thing was soldered with a standard iron and de-soldering wick. If you’re looking for a good starter FPGA project, this looks like a good one.

I started writing for Hack-A-Day a little over a year ago. I’ve barely taken a break, but for the next week I’m going to be taking some serious time off on a Caribbean island. Thanks for a great year guys! While I’m gone, [fbz] has kindly consented to take over the reins. I’m looking forward to another year when I get back, but right now I’ve got to finish packing my dive gear.

SMIP – Footpedal Keyboard Input

September 4, 2007 by 21 Comments


[iank] is tired of reaching for his mouse to use the scroll wheel, so he built SMIP. He modified a musical sustain pedal (momentary on switch) to output an unused key combination. Then he mapped the key combo in X-windows to let him be extra lazy. There are plenty of ways to map keys – usb keypads, etc, but this is the first time I’ve seen anyone try to replace a mouse command with a foot pedal.

Add USB Ports And A Flash Drive To You UMPC

September 1, 2007 by 11 Comments


[ThoughtFix] sent in our first ever UMPC hack. It’s along the lines of laptop mods we’ve seen before, but he deserves credit for opening up the already tightly packed inside of his UMPC, tapping the USB interface on his bluetooth card, adding a hub and an internal usb flash drive to provide readyboost to speed up Vista.

UClinux Based Embedded Asterix PBX

August 30, 2007 by 12 Comments


In my quest for a new VOIP setup (I’m hunting for a new sip provider – got suggestions?) I ran across an excellent project that’s been put together by [David]. It’s a four port open source asterix PBX that runs under UClinux. He derived the design from a BlackfinOne (A dedicated UClinux board). He covers building the IPO4 in four parts series that starts here. It’s probably one of the more intense open source hardware derived projects I’ve run across.

Black Hat 2007 Other Wireless

August 2, 2007 by 8 Comments


Luis Miras presented “Other Wireless: New ways of being Pwned”. Instead of common con topics like Bluetooth or WiFi, this dealt with the cheap radios used in wireless keyboards, mice, and things like the wireless remote pictured above. These RX/TX pairs are found in 27MHz, 900MHz, and 2.4GHz versions. The devices all use the same main components: a microcontroller, an EEPROM for storing the serial number, and the transmitter. The dongle is nearly the same only with a receiver.

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