[Drone] tipped us off about [Joachim]’s efforts to alter a crystal’s frequency. Through a process called penning, a crystal’s resonant frequency is lowered by painting the crystal with an indelible ink marker. Our curiosity piqued, we went off and found more information about penning crystals. It turns out this technique has been around for nearly as long as there have been amateur radio operators. Outside of your local oscillator, and radio jammer, how might you best use a hacked crystal?
[Paul Klemstine] is working on some PC-side software hacks for the IM-ME. We’ve seen a lot of hardware hacks for this device, such as controlling the display, firmware flashing, and using it as a spectrum analyzer, but if you don’t want to alter the device right away you can try [Paul’s] collection of hacks. Working with the code developed by [Ben Ryves] there is support for using the IM-ME as a command prompt, to control Win amp, and as a wireless keyboard. Crack out your C# skills and develop the next feature for this inexpensive device.
[William Etter] and his classmates built a quadcopter as a class project. We love the details of these builds and they came through with some thorough documentation. Some highlights that we enjoyed were reading about ABS body design and construction, their analysis of two versus three blade propellers, and their breadboarded control mechanism. You can see their success in the most recent post, but we all know that trial and error plays a role in these builds so we’re glad they’ve shared a collection of crashes with us.
Can’t get enough of this four-rotor action? Check out this project of a similar design.
We’ve noticed that wireless routers pump out a bunch of heat. [Jernej Kranjec] wanted to make sure that he didn’t fry it once he started adding more load to his router using OpenWRT. What he came up with is the idea of using an old CPU as a passive heat sink. He applied a bit of thermal paste to the center and some super glue to the corners. You can see the finished product is an old AMD chip adhered “dead bug” style to the stock processor. We’d bet it’s not very efficient compared to an aluminum or copper heat sink, but it normally would have no help in shedding those extra degrees.
[bunnie] has taken a few moments to show us how to turn our Chumby One into a 3g router. As it turns out, there is an easter egg that allows it to communicate with certain models of 3g dongles. There’s no GUI for this trick, so you’ll be doing most of your configuration via SSH. That shouldn’t be a problem for this crowd though. The Chumby One just got a lot more appealing.
[W1VLF] is on a quest to communicate over long distances with a 9 kilohertz transmitter. He built this giant coil with that in mind. A round concrete form was used as a base and wound with magnet wire by hand. We’d recommend building an automated winding device, but this method seems to have worked. Operating at 50 Watts on the air-core coil at 8.97 KHz he was able to pick up the signal at a distance of 5 kilometers. It’s not breaking any overall distance or portability records, but on a project like this the quest is where the fun is at.
[Thanks Drone]
[.ronin] built an all-in-one WiFi and Bluetooth sniffer. He used a Nerf rifle as a base and added two Pringles cantennas, a tablet PC, and other various bits to tie it all together. Now he wanders the streets, explaining the device to bewildered passersby. After showing the device at CarolinaCon 2010 (here’s a PDF of his presentation) he stopped by the mall nibbled about 250 Bluetooth devices using SpoofTooph. The software is running on a Fujitsu u810 tablet and he’s making good use of Backtrack 4 during his wireless adventures.
