Chumby Takes Its First Steps

October 13, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 14 Comments

nice screen image, though I doubt he'll ever catch us at that speed.

[Eric Gregory] has gone a bit mad scientist on the Chumby, turning it into a bipedal bot. We expected all kinds of cool chumby hacking, but we can’t say we saw this one coming. [Eric] points out that with a 454Mhz processor, 64MB of RAM, 2GB of expandable storage and a USB host port, the Chumby is more than capable as a robotics platform. With the addition of a mysterious and soon to be announced sensor board, he has made this chumby into a walking biped. While anyone who can write programs for linux, or even write flash applications can create software for the chumby, [Eric] chose to port the Robot Vision Toolkit over. This opens the doors to people who can write in Basic or who have written for the C64 or Apple][. You can see a video of this guy in action after the break.

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DIY Pulse Oximeter

May 2, 2010 by Mike Szczys 28 Comments

This pulse oximeter turned out very nicely. It is based around a Freescale microcontroller and detects pulse as well as oxygen saturation in your blood. The sensor is made of two wood pieces and allows two wavelengths of light to be shined through your finger. A sensor picks up the light on the other side of your stubby digit and the readings are compared to calculate saturation. Check out the finished project after the break.

We saw an Arduino-based oximeter a few months ago. These kind biometric hacks are rare around here. If you’ve got a well documented project don’t forget to tell us about it.

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Kindle 2 Teardown

February 25, 2009 by Eliot 25 Comments

kindle2

The people at iFixit have shown that they’re still on top of their game by tearing down the new Kindle 2 eBook reader. The main processor is a 532MHz ARM-11 from Freescale. Interestly, there isn’t any significant circuitry behind the large keyboard; it seems its existence is just to hide the battery.

[via Make]

Defcon 16: Badge Details Released

August 5, 2008 by Eliot 16 Comments

Defcon will once again be one-upping the sophistication of the conference attendee badges. Wired has just published a preview of this year’s badge. The core is a Freescale Flexis MC9S08JM60 processor. The badge has an IR transmitter and receiver on the front plus eight status LEDs. On the back (pictured below), there is a mode select button, CR123A battery, Data Matrix barcode, and an SD card slot. You can add a USB port to the badge and upload code to it using the built in USB bootloader. All the dev tools needed will be included on the conference CD or you can download the IDE in advance. The low barrier to entry should lead to some interesting hacks. In previous years, you needed a special dongle to program the hardware. There is no indication as to what the badge does out of the box. Releasing the badge early is a first for Defcon and the one pictured isn’t the attendee color, but we’re sure someone will still come up with a clone.

Now comes the fun part: What do you think the best use of this badge will be? Would Defcon be so cavalier as to equip everyone in the conference with a TV-B-Gone? I think our favorite possibility is if someone finds a security hole and manages to write an IR based worm to take over all the badges.

Defcon 14 introduced the first electronic badge which blinked in different patterns. Defcon 15 had a 95 LED scrolling marquee. [Joe Grand] will be posting more specific Defcon 16 badge details to his site after the opening ceremony. Check out more high resolution photos on Wired.

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