USB Mouse With Storage Added

September 30, 2010 by Mike Szczys 31 Comments

[Thice] wanted to try his hand at incorporating a USB driving into other devices. He chose to add storage to his USB mouse but didn’t want to alter the factory look provided by a color-changing LED inside. To make things fit he ended up cutting a good portion of a USB hub’s circuit board off and placing it beneath the mouse circuitry. You can see the board from the thumb drive wedged into one end of the case in the image above.

He sees this as a way of hiding data in plain sight. This is true, and it’s along the same lines we’ve seen before with a WiFi dongle in a mouse, or the thumbdrive in a controller hacks. To be truly hidden we’d like to see someone incorporate a microcontroller that monitors the mouse buttons for a certain code, and then toggles the voltage to the USB storage. This would simulate plugging and unplugging the drive, hiding it virtually as well as physically.

4-player SNES And More

July 20, 2010 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

[Mr.X] added support for four controllers to his Super Nintendo (Google translated) by internalizing the multi-player adapter. In the video after the break you’ll notice that he also added some bling to the case by positioning the power LED beneath the logo and adding a two-digit display. There is a switch on the back that allows him to choose PAL or NTSC standards with the current setting shown on that display. While most people are going with emulators, [Mr.X] ended up with a custom piece of hardware with a clean finish.

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USB Hub Used For In System Programming

June 7, 2010 by Mike Szczys 37 Comments

Did you order that 4-port USB hub because it was almost free but now it’s just sitting in your junk box? Why not turn it into an In System Programmer for AVR chips? [Paul] came up with HUB ISP as an answer to the chicken-or-egg problem we’ve seen with other diy programmers. It uses the data wires from four different USB cables to program AVR chips, enlisting the help of a 74HC00 NAND gate along the way. You do not need to have a programmed microcontroller as all the magic happens on the software end of things. The one caveat is that [Paul’s] method currently only works on Linux machines.

1-Wire LAN With An LCD

March 23, 2010 by Jakob Griffith 14 Comments

[Viktor], one of our favorite avid hackers, has been playing around with 1-wire systems all this month. What started out as a MicroLAN Fonera has turned into an iButton interface, to a 1-wire powered hub, and finally a 1-wire character driven LCD. Anyone looking at 1-wire systems or OWFS could surely benefit from his testing.

However, if you still haven’t gotten your fill of 1-wire goodness, let us remind you of the 1-wire HVAC and IPv6 to 1-wire protocol translator.

[Thanks Juan]

Build Your Own Hub Motor

February 18, 2010 by Mike Szczys 52 Comments

Hub motors put the power inside of the wheel. [Teamtestbot] goes deep into the hows and whys of building these motors, from parts, to windings, to the math behind the power ratios. The working example puts an electric motor inside the rear wheel of a Razor scooter. Past projects used belts to transfer the work of the motor to the wheel of the scooter. By integrating the motor and the wheel you end up with a much cleaner looking product. Check out the motor testing and the scooter test drive after the break.

For more tips on building your own electric motors take a peek at the Fly Electric page we covered back in November.

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SNES System In The Controller

December 22, 2009 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

Want to take your SNES emulation to your friend’s house? [Chris] worked out a way to fit the important parts inside of an original Super Nintendo controller. He removed the case from a 4GB thumb drive as well as a USB hub. Using a RetroZone kit he gave the controller a USB interface. By soldering the thumb drive and RetroZone board directly to the hub he’s reduced the package down to just one cable. Everything fits inside the controller case and now when you plug it into the computer you can fire up the ROMs you copied from your original cartridges that are stored on the thumb drive.

Of course this isn’t limited to SNES emulation but the real question is can you boot from the thumb drive?

25C3: Power Line Communication

December 28, 2008 by Eliot 13 Comments

plc

[Florian] and [Xavier Carcelle] started the day at 25C3 by covering power line communication. PLC technology is not widespread in the US, but has gained popularity in countries like France where it’s included in set-top boxes. PLC lets you create a local network using the AC wires in your wall. The team started exploring PLC because despite being newer technology, it had a few principles that made it similar to old networks. There’s no segmentation in the wiring, which means it behaves like a layer 2 hub. You get to see all of the traffic unlike a switched network. Most power meters don’t filter out the signal, so it’s possible that you might see your next-door neighbor’s traffic on your line. [Florian] reports having seen all the traffic in a six-story building just by plugging in. The wiring also acts as a large antenna so you could employ tempest attacks.

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