Most people don’t use their floppy drive anymore so you might as well make a car out of it, right? If you short two sets of pins in the drive connector, the motor will spin freely when 5V is applied. This motor is used to drive the rear axle. The front wheel is steered using the read/write head’s stepper motor. An NE555 timer is used to pulse the motor when the steering buttons are pushed. This design is really simple and has a tethered control, but it is a good starting point if you want to try something else.

[thanks Boff]

Continue reading “Floppy Drive RC Car” →

If you understand that alphabet soup title you’re in for a treat. Igor Cesko’s original project was constructing an IR interface for his computer so he could control it remotely. He built a simple serial dongle for this task because he didn’t want to use a microcontroller for decoding the IR. USB is becoming far more common than serial interfaces so Igor decided to try programming a microcontroller for USB communication. His controller works for his IR project, but it should be easy to use for any other project you want a USB interface on. His most recent project was teaching an AVR to do UDP. Using his IR -> UDP device and a crossover cable he can place the receiver farther away from the computer. It requires a full duplex connection and has been tested connected directly to a NIC. It’s unknown whether it will function properly connected to a router.

[thanks johannes]

Continue reading “USB And UDP Using An AVR” →

[Roo] seems to think we’ve been neglecting the NSLU2 or “slug”. It’s true we have spent a lot of time fawning over the Linksys WRT54G instead. The slug is definitely worthy of attention though. It is a small network appliance with two USB ports that you are supposed to attach disk drives to for simple network storage. Add a little custom firmware and you’re free to use the USB ports for whatever you want.

The XScale processor in the slug comes underclocked from the factory. Following the instructions on the NSLU2-Linux wiki you can pop one resistor off of the circuit board to restore the full 266Mhz. Benchmarks, temperature, and power consumption after the change are covered.

Continue reading “Overclocking A Linksys NSLU2” →

Here’s another IR hack released at Toorcon.  SurveySays (from Midnight Research Labs) is software that will intercept signals from remotes or “clickers” that universities use for test and quiz taking in class. According to the site, there are over a million of these remotes out there at hundreds of schools (UC Berkeley and SFSU to name a couple around [sith]’s area). SurveySays will display the most commonly given answer by the classroom on the screen and will also issue a trigger after every round. You can send in this answer automatically, for you or for a group of friends =). Have fun!

[thanks sith]

Continue reading ““Clicker” Hacking” →

[Irongeek] has assembled a good starting point for hacking network printers. It starts with a discussion of stock passwords and how to administrate printers using telnet. Next is finding printers using NMAP. You can actually use the JetDirect boxes as idle scan zombies to scan other systems without exposing yourself. Other topics include setting up direct IP printing, changing the display, and using Hijetter from the Phenoelit crew. The ability to capture and replay print jobs really demonstrates how insecure network printing is.

[Irongeek] is also a great source for making the most of your Zaurus and has video demos of other hacking topics.

Continue reading “Hacking Network Printers” →

The Scribbler Bot was inspired by a flash toy called scribbler. Scribbler lets you make a simple line drawing and then generates a more complex drawing by applying a set of algorithms. The Scribbler Bot moves the drawing into the physical world. It is a simple two axis plotter using two stepper motors and a control board. The plotter wasn’t intended to be very accurate since the shuddering adds a new level of complexity to the drawing. The plotter control is through a Dreamweaver plugin, but it should be able to take any binary feed. Thanks to Douglas McDonald for the cool project and for scribbling out our logo in ball-point pen.

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There aren’t many people that want to spend money on a printer whose sole purpose is to print directly on a CD. I’m sure there are quite a few out there that have an extra inkjet printer laying around looking for something to do. Why not chop it up into a dedicated label printer? This tutorial shows how to modify an Epson 640 printer, but it should work on any printer with the same style feed. So, if you’ve got one, try and decipher the heavily watermarked images and have a go.

[thanks com]

Continue reading “CD Printer” →