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97 Articles

Bohemian Rhapsody On Old Hardware

April 19, 2009 by 24 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ht96HJ01SE4]

Here’s another junk music performance to add to the list. [bd594] put together this rendition of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody on assorted computing equipment. The lead piano sound is from an Atari 800XL. Lead guitar is a Texas Instruments TI-99/4a. An 8inch floppy plays bass while a HP ScanJet 3C covers the vocals. He had to dub the scanner four times to get all of the vocal parts. He wanted to use four independent scanners but the prices on eBay were forbidding. The use of oscilloscopes to show the wave forms in the video is a nice touch. Check out our post about Radiohead’s Nude for more examples of this.

[via adafruit]

Stepper Motor Controller From Old Scanner

April 10, 2009 by 7 Comments

sms

[Murray484] submitted his instructable on how to create a stepper motor controller from an old scanner. He removed the motor and controller from an old scanner then harvested the parts. He’s pretty much starting over, taking the ULN2003 chip from the scanner motor controller and putting it on a fresh board. He then wired it all up, installed the software and got it working. Finally, he built a container out of cardboard for it all. Though he could have made it nicer looking and used higher quality building materials, he was trying to make this a “green” project for the epilog laser cutter contest. He’s done a good job recycling, this could be pretty useful.

LCD That Scans Fingerprints

November 5, 2008 by 10 Comments

auo_uv

AU Optronics Corp has unveiled a new LCD panel that doubles as a fingerprint scanner. Each pixel is equipped with 4 optical sensors, so a 320×240 screen would have a scanning resolution of 640×480. They have also experimented with different sensors, such as UV. You can see an LCD panel that detects and displays the UV index above. Why did they use a secondary display to show the data though?

[via Gearlog]

Obsolete Technology Band

June 5, 2008 by 31 Comments


Radiohead held a contest for fans to remix the single Nude from their album In Rainbows. Frontman Thom Yorke mentioned on NPR that the contest was essentially a joke, since the Nude track is recorded at 6/8 timing and 63bpm, much slower than traditionally mixed music. The above video from [James Houston] is one of the most creative entries. Using old computer hardware he has recreated the track in a very unique way. He uses a Sinclair ZX Spectrum for the guitar track, a dot matrix printer for the drums, a scanner for bass, and a hard drive array for vocals.

Want to make your own band with obsolete technology? Click through for a few pointers to get you started.

Continue reading “Obsolete Technology Band” →

24C3 Toying With Barcodes

December 30, 2007 by 24 Comments

[FX] from Phenoelit gave an entertaining talk about barcode security. He covered both how the systems are implemented and how they’ve been exploited. The first example was a parking garage in Dresden that issues non unique barcodes for the unlimited passes that hotels give out. Anyone code print out an image of that particular code and park for free. German grocery stores have automated machines that refund you for your empty beer bottles. The barcode generated just states the refund amount (5 digits) that you’ll get at the register. Just stick the barcode under something like a six pack and it’ll scan even without the cashier seeing it.

Check out the video to find out more silliness involving DVD rentals, boarding passes, asset management, and SQL injection via the scanner. You can even find higher res versions in the 24C3 media archives.

Happy Halloween Extra

October 31, 2007 by 6 Comments


Happy Halloween! I’m in the mood for an extra, and I’ve got some stuff that’s been turning to zombies from the tipline.
Pictured above is a nice simple LED pumpkin sent in by [John]- perfect for the hacker with less than stellar art skills.
Let’s not forget [mastershake]s Hack-A-Day pumpkin from last year. Where’s the THAD pumpkin you promised? [Wolfgang] sent in these mini pumpkin bots – they look like toys, but they’re made from XBox parts and radio control cars.
Last year Max sent in his talking Halloween basket. (I always wanted to strap that voice module to a co-workers chair…)
[Brandon] built a budget (~$150) guitar hero controller out of a Gibson Epoch guitar from target.
This scanner cam has been around for a while, but I admire how he keeps fine tuning and tweaking the design. Thanks to [Loopymind] for passing it along.
I keep getting emails telling me that Google Earth has a flight simulator. Yes. We all know about it.