A Singing Arc Lighter

We’ve all been guilty of buying things we want, but don’t need. And that’s how [PodeCoet] found himself in possession of a couple of double-arc electric lighters, thanks to those far-eastern websites purveying cheap goods. ‘Tis the season of giving after all, justified [PodeCoet]. Being a hacker, the obvious thing to do was to make them belt out tinny tunes. If you’re still holding on to your gas lighters, don’t — because these electric ones are ‘oh so hackable’. Dual-arcs are the same, but twice the fun.

[PodeCoet] starts off with a tear down of the lighter, to figure out the schematic and understand how it works. There’s a charger IC for the LiPo, an unidentifiable micro-controller, a pair of FET’s driving a pair of power transistors, which in turn drive the HF output transformer at around 15.6kHz. He guesses that the “original micro-controller is probably an OTP part like a 12C508” but in the absence of a chipID he couldn’t be sure.

Instead of trying to break his head over it, he just swapped in a pin-compatible PIC12F1840. All that’s left to do is to write some quick-n-dirty code and sprinkle it with funny comments in order to modulate the output signal at audio frequencies. His first choice of tune was “We are Number One” by Lazy Town, the Icelandic educational musical comedy children’s television series (phew). But redditors are awesome, and someone asked him to add the “Imperial March” and [PodeCoet] obliged.

Since he was going to gift these lighters, the sneaky hacker added a prank in the code. Every time the button is pressed for more than two seconds, it works as normally expected and a counter is incremented. On the 20th count, and for one time only, the tune is played. No amount of pressing the button will play the tune again, confounding the user to wonder if he was hallucinating. This also helps ensure the lighter does not self-destruct prematurely, since the output transformer is likely designed for low duty cycles. His blog post contains all of the information needed to do this hack along with handy tips to avoid the problems he faced. A “Happy Birthday” tune would be great when lighting some birthday candles, we think.

[PodeCoet] has a fancy for high voltage stuff – check out “Home built Stun Baton turns you into a cop from Demolition Man“. This man surely loves his pranks, as evidenced by “Hacking your Co-Workers Label Makers“. And the farce is strong in this one — “Student trolls anti-Arduino Prof with parasite MCU“.

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StarMAT Greets Visitors With The Imperial March

Strong is the Force, with this Padawan. To coincide with the latest installment of the continuing saga from a galaxy far, far away, [Rohit Gupta] built a Star-Wars themed interactive doormat. The doormat detects a footstep using capacitive sensing and plays a random Star Wars audio clip like the opening theme or the Imperial March or a famous phrase from the movie. Check out the video below the break.

The current setup is temporarily breadboarded, but we are sure it will be popular enough with his visitors to make him tidy it up. The hardware consists of an Arduino with an audio shield connected to a pair of speakers. A capacitive wire loop under the mat and a capacitive sensor tuned to the mat size wire take care of the sensing.

When Earth people step on the mat, the sensor triggers the Arduino to play a random audio clip from the SD card. The capacitive sensing is taken care by the TP223 1-key touch pad detector chip (PDF), which he mounted on a home etched board with SMD parts. The whole bundle is powered by a small “power bank” battery pack like the ones used to charge mobile phones.

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Star Wars Imperial March Played By Dual Floppy Drives

Although many have made some sort of music with improvised electronics, few sound as cool as this Imperial March from Star Wars played by two floppy drives. According to [Pawel], “It’s nothing new” and quite simple. This may be true as we’ve featured an Imperial March-playing floppy drive here before, but it was only one drive. Although it may not be the London Symphony Orchestra, the two drives together sound quite good!

According to him, the FDD has a fairly simple interface. To move the head, one simply needs to pull the DRVSB pin low and then activate the STEP pin on a falling edge.  This will make the head move one direction dependent on the DIR pin state. In this case, an ATMega microcontroller is moving everything. An explanation of the pins used in this hack can be found here.

Although it may look like an intimidating hack on the surface, something like this might be a neat project to try with some old hardware and an Arduino or other controller! [Pawel] did have the idea to hook up a 5 1/4″ and 8″ drive to make a full FDD orchestra, so we can’t wait to see what he comes up with! Continue reading “Star Wars Imperial March Played By Dual Floppy Drives”