A Wireless Computer Remote That Emulates A USB Keyboard

May 25, 2014 by Nick Conn 7 Comments

PCRemote

If you are anything like [Antoine], you would love to be able to control your PC with a simple hand-held remote control from anywhere in your house. [Antoine] wrote in to tell us about his wireless computer remote that emulates a USB keyboard, making it suitable for any device that uses a USB keyboard.

His blog post is very well written and contains a ton of design information and background on the project. He initially wanting to easily control his PC’s music from anywhere in his house without needing to be within line of sight of his computer. The end result is a very handy remote that can be used to change music, video, and even launch applications on his computer. The system consists of a base station for his remote that connects to the computer and acts as a USB keyboard, and the remote itself. The base station uses V-USB on an Arduino to interface with the computer, and VirtualWire to handle the wireless protocol for the remote. For those of you who don’t know about VirtualWire (now superseded by RadioHead), it is a very cool Arduino library that lets you easily use raw wireless interfaces (also called vanilla wireless interfaces).

Without going into too much detail here (be sure to see the actual post for more information), the remote itself was redesigned after the initial proof of concept to maximize battery life. The final power consumption is very impressive, resulting in a battery life of more than two years! This remote system is very well put together and contains many aspects that can easily be reused for other projects.

Arduino Garage Door Opener Is Security Minded

May 25, 2014 by Rick Osgood 13 Comments

Do it yourself garage door openers must be all the rage nowadays. We just got word of another take on this popular idea. [Giles] was commissioned by his friend to find a way to control the friend’s garage door using a smart phone. The request was understandable, considering the costly garage door remote and the fact that the buttons on the expensive remote tended to fail after a while. The inspiration for this project came from some YouTube videos of other similar projects. Those projects all paired an Arduino with a Bluetooth headset in order to control the door from a mobile phone. [Giles] understood that while this would get the job done, it wouldn’t be very secure. Bluetooth headsets typically connect to mobile phones using a four digit PIN. Many of them have known default PINs and even if the default is changed, it wouldn’t take very long to guess a four digit PIN. [Giles] knew he had to find a more secure way.

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This Sassy Art Installation Is Like The Stanley Parable For The Telephone

May 24, 2014 by Rick Osgood 7 Comments

Insert Customer Feedback Here

Imagine this. A phone on a nearby desk starts ringing. No one is around to pick it up, so you decide that you will be a good Samaritan and answer the phone. You are greeted by a slightly creepy robotic female voice asking you to complete a simple survey. Having nothing else to do, you go ahead and run through the telephone survey. As you start answering the questions, things start to get a bit… weird. The robot voice doesn’t like your answers. She actually disagrees with you, and she does NOT like being interrupted. Now she’s getting sassy with you! What is going on here?

Most likely you are the latest victim of Insert Customer Feedback Here, [Charles’] art installation. You see, that is no ordinary telephone. [Charles] actually removed the guts of an old telephone and replaced them with an Arduino. The Arduino periodically rings the phone, waiting for someone to answer. Once the phone is off the hook, the Arduino uses a Wave shield to start playing back the scripted audio files. All of the text-to-speech files and the various hold music files are played back with the wave shield. The Arduino is also hooked up to the 1, 2, 3, and # keys of the telephone keypad in order to read back the user’s responses.

From here on out the program acts as a sort of “choose your own adventure” game. The program takes different paths and responds in different ways depending on how the user answers the questions. Generally speaking, it will get more “irritated” towards the user if it doesn’t “like” your answers, otherwise it will get less irritated. The hold music will even change to become more or less aggressive.

It’s easy to draw comparisons to Portal’s GLaDOS due to the robotic female voice and to the narrator from The Stanley Parable for the “choose your own adventure” feeling. In fact, if GLaDOS and The Stanley Parable had offspring, this would surely be it. This project brings that same type of silly sarcastic humor to a different medium and it does it well. Be sure to watch the video of the system in action below. It really starts to get interesting around the 1:15 mark. Continue reading “This Sassy Art Installation Is Like The Stanley Parable For The Telephone” →

LED Clock Looks Cool AND Tells Time

May 16, 2014 by Rich Bremer 7 Comments

Clocks have taken many forms of the years, starting with shadow clocks and sundials in Egypt around 3500 BC. Obviously, these could only tell the time while the sun was out. Water Clocks followed which could track time in the dark. Water Clocks are basically a bowl with a hole in the bottom. This bowl was set in a container filled with water. The water entered the bowl at a consistent rate and graduations on the inside of the bowl showed how much time had passed.

Mechanical clocks followed, as did quartz and the atomic clock. We have now entered a new era in time-telling, the Bamboo LED Clock. [Pascal] brings us this funky fresh chronometer all the way from Germany.

The front face is made from a bamboo pizza plate and gives the clock some modern minimalist pizzazz. A 1-meter long LED strip is attached to the circumference of the plate and contains 60 individually assignable RGB LED’s. An Arduino and Real Time Clock are responsible for the time keeping and coordination of the LED’s.

As you can see in the photo, 2 of the LED’s colors are used. The single red LED indicates the hour. The strip of blue LED’s show the minutes. If you’d like to build one of these [Pascal] has shared the Arduino code on his Instructables page.

Introducing The Arduino Zero

May 15, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 80 Comments

The Arduino Uno is the old standby of the Arduino world, with the Arduino Due picking up where the Mega left off. The Arduino Tre is a pretty cool piece of kit combining a Linux system with the Arduino pinout. Care to take a guess at what the next Arduino board will be called? The Arduino Zero, obviously.

The Arduino Zero uses an Atmel ARM Cortex-M0+ for 256kB of Flash and 32k of RAM. The board supports Atmel’s Embedded Debugger, finally giving the smaller Arduino boards debugging support.

The chip powering the Zero features six communications modules, configurable as a UART, I2C, or SPI. USB device and host are also implemented on the chip, but there’s no word in the official word if USB host will be available. There are two USB connectors on the board, though.

The Arduino folk will be demoing the Zero at the Bay Area Maker Faire this weekend. Hackaday will have boots on the ground there, so we’ll try to get a more detailed report including pricing and availability then.

Learning To Reverse Engineer On A Broken Printer

May 15, 2014 by Rick Osgood 14 Comments

Lexmark Hack

When a Lexmark inkjet printer stopped working, [Mojobobo] was able to claim it as his own. He quickly realized that the machine was flooded with ink and not worth repairing, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t still find a use for it. When he learned that the printer’s firmware was not only upgradable but also unprotected, he knew he should be able to get the printer to do his own bidding.

[Mojobobo] started his journey with the motherboard. The unit still powered up, but it was asking to insert a “duplex module” before it would boot any further. [Mojobobo] first tried to find a way to trick the duplex module sensor, but was unsuccessful. His next step was to search for some kind of serial communications port. He didn’t have an oscilloscope, so instead he used a speaker with a wire probe. In theory, if the wire was pressed against an active serial port, he would be able to hear varying tones through the speaker. Sure enough, he found some interesting tones after probing around some ports next to a “JTAG” label. He looked up some information about the nearby chip and found that it included an SPI bus.

After some internet research, [Mojobobo] learned enough about SPI to have a rough idea of how to use it. Having limited tools available to him, he decided to use his Arduino to try to communicate with the motherboard. After wiring up a simple circuit, (and then re-wiring it) he was able to dump the first 4096 bytes of the motherboard’s boot loader to the Arduino via the SPI interface.

[Mojobobo’s] next steps will be to find a faster way to dump the boot loader. At 9600 baud, he grew tired of waiting after three hours. Once he has the full boot loader he intends to search for a way to bypass the duplex sensor and get the board to finish booting. Then he may just use the printer for its scanning functions, or he might find other interesting uses for it.

Programming Micros With Impossibly Cheap Bluetooth Adapters

May 14, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 36 Comments

tooth

[Zenios] and [Raivis] are building a small balancing robot, and for communications to the outside world, they’re using a small, extremely cheap Bluetooth adapter. They figured uploading code to the microcontroller over Bluetooth would be a good idea, but their adapter, a cheap HC-06 module, had no way of resetting the microcontroller; it just provided Tx and Rx the serial port. They did notice a LED blinked when a device wasn’t connected to the adapter, so with a simple circuit they kludged a reset circuit where it wasn’t intended.

The small LED on the HC-06 module blinks when nothing is connected, and remains on when a connection is established. Figuring a new connection would be a good time to upload new code, the guys needed to design a circuit that would stay low when the LED was blinking, and switch to high when the LED was on.

A simple RC filter took care of the blinking LED, keeping the line low until a device connected. Bringing the logic level high when the LED stayed solid required digging through a part drawer, eventually finding an LM741 p differential amplifier.

After a few small changes to the bootloader, the guys had a reliable means of flashing new firmware without the need of programming adapters or wires draped over their workspace, all with a Bluetooth adapter that shouldn’t have this capability. Video below.

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